Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography

Abstract

One warm August afternoon three summers ago, I sat in the crisply air-conditioned Special Collections reading room at the Amherst College Library, stroking Noah Webster's hair. It was coarse, red, and, needless to say, no longer attached to his head. Earlier that day I had come across the catalog entry Lock of in the finding guide for the Noah Webster Family Papers and had smiled at the quaintness of it, of someone thinking Webster's hair-his hair!-was precious enough to preserve. I imagined Webster's daughter Eliza carefully clipping a length of her father's hair (and her mother's, too), tying the locks with ribbon, and placing them in a neatly labeled envelope. Keeping locks of loved ones' hair was common in Eliza's time, of course, but it still struck me as terribly sweet. Maybe a bit too sweet, I thought, in my jaded, scholarly way, never expecting the effect it would have on me. In our everyday life, touching someone's hair is an incredibly intimate gesture-exchanged between besotted lovers, between doting parents and their milky newborns-and when I traded in my yellow call slip for that swirl of ginger hair I found myself feeling closer to Webster than I had ever felt when reading even his most personal papers. That lifeless, limp hair had spent decades in an envelope, in a folder, in a box, on a shelf, but holding it in the palm of my hand made me feel an eerie intimacy with Noah himself. And, against all logic, it made me feel as though I knew him -and, even less logically, liked him -just a bit better.1 Finding out and writing about people, living or dead, is tricky work. It is necessary to balance intimacy with distance while at the same time being inquisitive to the point of invasiveness. Getting too close to your subject is a major danger, but not getting to know her well enough is just as likely. Unfortunately, much as biogra-