Interviewing everyman: William Sheridan Allen, Theodore Rosengarten, and the allure of pseudonymous history

Abstract

ABSTRACT Anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and journalists all talk to people to learn about their lives. Yet, while anthropologists and sociologists tend to craft pseudonyms for their narrators and disguise or fabricate details to prevent re-identification, journalists and historians prefer to use real names. To explain this divergence, this article offers the stories of two books born out of the 1960s and early 1970s, a moment when history and the social sciences were unusually close. The two books, The Nazi Seizure of Power by William Sheridan Allen, and All God’s Dangers by Theodore Rosengarten, featured pseudonyms for people and places that soon after were publicly identified by others. So far as anonymity is concerned, they failed. Yet as books, they have proven successes, remaining in print and on syllabi decades after publication. I suggest that this is not a coincidence, and that the pseudonyms in these two books are more than futile efforts to protect individuals’ identities. Rather, they may reflect an openness to other genres – anthropology, sociology, and even literature – that enriched their writing and expanded their impact. While I would not go so far as to recommend pseudonyms to today’s historians, the power of these two books can remind us to tell the biggest stories we can.