Maeve Week 8: Lepore Response, Primary Source

Lepore’s point that perhaps microhistories can be broadly described as the history of ordinary people’s lives while biographies are the stories of the extraordinary stuck with me, despite her refutation of that point in the next paragraph. Lepore finds that dichotomy untrue and also not useful; still, it made me think about the ways that we (readers, writers) situate those about whom we write. After a moment of thought I realized that it can be incredibly tempting to look for evidence of movements, cultural trends, events, et cetera in the words and actions of individuals – in part to affirm that those movements, etc, were real, and impactful, and noticed.

Additionally, Lepore discusses whether distinct betrayal of confidence can be “licit” for journalists. This marks a longer passage about the obligations that historians, journalists and biographers assume when they choose a subject. The title of the piece – and its concern with too much love – felt most relevant to me during this section. It is a difficult to take on any project and not want to do a good job; I think we have all felt that. What Lepore is implicating, I think, is that when writing about individuals and “rifling through certain drawers” of their lives, it can become almost impossible to extricate one’s desire to accomplish a good project with one’s growing attachment to one’s subject (Malcom qtd. in Lepore). The idea of the unofficial contract between investigator and subject (alive or not) is interesting – I did not come away with a sense of how I feel about it.

Lepore’s ending argument is that biographers might be more likely, ultimately, to love their subject too much than are microhistorians. If we accept her descriptions of microhistories vs. biographies, then I think that Proposition 2 is the most convincing evidence for that argument. If indeed microhistories situate their subjects as people living, and ultimately acting, based on changing forces around them, then perhaps they are more subject to depersonalizing the subject, or at least making them seem non-unique or exceptional. According to Lepore, biographers, on the other hand, seek find the exceptional for their subjects. I think it is convincing to think that that very exceptionalism that made them an attractive candidate for a biography is deeply connected to what makes their biographers so attached to them.

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Primary Source Excerpt

This source is another piece of Huey Newton's writing on prison. My project is shifting to focus primarily on understanding prisons' effects on individuals and communities and how the Black Panther Party specifically responded to those effects. This piece helps to further demonstrate a perspective from within Panther leadership. Newton's account in this essay, "Prison, The Prisoner, And Society", strengthens my argument about the way that prison was viewed as a mechanism of dehumanization then and now, and that many activist efforts were oriented towards re-humanizing those affected by incarceration, then and now.