2022.06.26 历史从来都不只是一个人的故事

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History Is Never Only One Person’s Story
A good group biography details with curiosity the ways, trivial and tremendous, that humans influence one another.

By Talya Zax
An illustration of a book with a house's window on the cover that allows viewers to see silhouettes of people gathered inside, talking.
Matt Chase
JUNE 26, 2022
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The group biography has been around for centuries: There was Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, written some 1,900 years ago and a staple of classical education ever since; the Bishop Gregory of Tours’ sixth-century biography of the four distasteful sons of the Frankish King Clovis I; a swarm of medieval hagiographies that bind together the lives and miracles of saints. In addition to being foundational to the biographical genre, modern group biographies are excellent sources of historical trivia, ideas, and, happily, gossip.

The questions that make these biographies sing—what makes this group of people actually interesting, not just noteworthy? Why, of all the relationships in a life, were these so particularly influential?—take real searching to answer. To read a good group biography is to come out with a different level of appreciation for the ways, trivial and tremendous, that humans influence one another.


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The canon is overwhelmingly white and Eurocentric, and can tend toward an understanding of history in which educated people’s conversations are uncritically seen as the engines behind progress. The influence of hagiography—which today colloquially refers to an exaggerated celebration rather than a straightforward recounting—remains clear, especially when there’s less space to get into each individual’s unflattering traits. And yet: These books’ joys are really something. Here are nine animating, searching, and interrogative titles with which to start.

The cover of The Immortal Evening
W. W. Norton and Company
The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner With Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb, by Stanley Plumly

Seeking Romantic-era trash talk? Stop here first. Plumly, a poet, adopted an unusual structure for this thoughtful look at not only John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb, but also a cast of luminaries including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the egotistical but mediocre painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and the essayist William Hazlitt. The book tells the story of a London dinner, hosted by the forever impoverished Haydon and attended by the other central figures, and spins their intertwining stories out from there. It’s a compelling, accessible introduction to the highly flawed personalities behind an artistic movement that continues to exercise broad influence, and it finds a way to movingly humanize its characters. In both their achievements and their personal failings, the Romantics tend to stand larger than life. In Plumly’s vision, they are simply people whose attunement to the world and one another created a filigreed intimacy—intricate, beautiful, and liable to break.

Read: The fraught friendships of eight great artists

The cover of The Three Mothers
Flatiron
The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation, by Anna Malaika Tubbs

Alberta King, Louise Little, Berdis Baldwin: Their sons became voices of generational significance, figures so great that the extent to which their genius was tied to the specific influence of their families and communities can be overlooked in popular imagination. That representation, Tubbs shows, is a disservice not just to the work of those men—it’s easier to dismiss ideas imagined to come from a lone reformer than those understood to have deep communal roots—but, crucially, to the women who raised them. In Tubbs’s treatment, those women are worth knowing foremost for the work that they made of their own lives, not their sons’ achievements. Very different from one another, with different struggles and different joys, the “three mothers” embodied and deliberately conveyed to their children the qualities that made them notable: resilience, a clear-eyed view of injustice, and a fierce commitment to equality.

The cover of The Shores of Bohemia
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
The Shores of Bohemia: A Cape Cod Story, 1910–1960, by John Taylor Williams

Think of Cape Cod today, and the first word that comes to mind is unlikely to be radical. But the New England enclave, now associated with well-heeled vacationers, was, in the first decades of the 20th century, a center for artistic and political progress. Edna St. Vincent Millay rubbed elbows with associates of Emma Goldman; the artist Helen Frankenthaler and the novelist Mary McCarthy each had romances with the acerbic critic Clement Greenberg. Among the who’s who of people now enshrined as American greats were a slew of characters no less noteworthy for being less well known: Dodie Merwin, a committed admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson who became a center of Cape social life; Nina Romanov, a Russian princess in exile; Mardi Hall, an artist and a host of elaborate parties; and more. Altogether, the milieu on the Cape—the famous and their forgotten companions alike—built a world of perpetual creative ferment, a hub from which great trends in art, philosophy, and politics spread to the rest of the country. Williams gives an expansive and alluring account of the Cape’s heyday. You’ll wish you could have been there.

The cover of Sisters of Mokama
Viking
Sisters of Mokama: The Pioneering Women Who Brought Hope and Healing to India, by Jyoti Thottam

In 1946, six nuns from Kentucky arrived in the small northern Indian town of Mokama with plans to found a hospital. India, already suffering from the brutal effects of Partition, was in the middle of a public-health crisis. Around that time, 158 of every 1,000 newborns were dying in their first year of life, disease was rampant, and a staggeringly insufficient number of doctors tended to the population. Sisters of Mokama follows the Mokama nuns; the crew of women who came to staff their hospital, called Nazareth; and the generations of nurses they trained—including Thottam’s mother. They each became a small but significant part of the story of how India moved forward from the dire conditions that marked the onset of its independence, and particularly the story of how Indian women found new opportunities in their radically reshaped country. Although the six nuns who began the venture are at the heart of Thottam’s story, she extends equal curiosity and compassion to all the women who passed through Nazareth in its first two decades. The hospital still stands today.

Read: Misunderstanding Susan Sontag

The cover of Fatal Discord
Harper
Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther and the Fight for the Western Mind, by Michael Massing

The central duo in Massing’s opus make a natural pair. Both were intellectual radicals during the political, religious, and artistic upheaval of the 16th century, an exceptionally unstable time, but the two could not have differed more in their approach to gaining influence. The younger Martin Luther began his volatile career as an admirer of the diplomatic Erasmus of Rotterdam, only to decide that the older man’s ideas were too cautious for the demands of their time. Luther’s choice to pursue outright rebellion reshaped Europe and pushed his one-time intellectual lodestar out of the historical limelight. In some ways, it’s a classic story of conflict between an elder statesman and a young upstart. But with Massing’s deft touch, it becomes a fresh reflection on the ways in which the great shifts of history are both capricious—so much so that a single malcontent can set them in motion—and the foreseeable recurring function of human restlessness.

The cover of The Saigon Sisters
Northern Illinois University Press
The Saigon Sisters: Privileged Women in the Resistance, by Patricia D. Norland

Under French colonial rule in Vietnam, a small group of Vietnamese girls were educated in lycées, French secondary schools, alongside the daughters of the colonial elite. As revolution approached and American interference escalated, many had the option to leave their home country and escape the violence. Norland tells the stories of nine who chose to stay, and who, after spending their childhoods secretly dreaming of Vietnamese independence, found surprising ways into the resistance. She also tells how, after the end of the Vietnam War, they came to reconnect. In the end, they found, the privileges they experienced as children helped teach them the importance of the fight they would come to join. Their small group became its own source of revolutionary ferment: The sense of patriotism felt by each fueled the others, and set them on their extraordinarily courageous paths. “We concluded,” one said, “we had to have our own revolution.”

The cover of Mutinous Women
Basic Books
Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast, by Joan DeJean

Also in need of a revolution in their home country, but born several decades too early: The 132 French women, convicted of crimes as small as eating a stash of consecrated hosts in a time of scarcity, who were involuntarily sent to America’s Gulf Coast in 1719. Only 62 survived the journey, finding themselves on arrival in territory that, having been billed as resource-rich and ripe for development, was challenging in the extreme and sparsely dotted with French settlements. Yet the women found in their new surroundings opportunities that would have been impossible in France. They worked, married, and built the foundations of communities such as Mobile and New Orleans, forging bonds with one another along the way. Their lives became early examples of the American dream, and of its violence. Some of the women enslaved people. Others became involved in conflict between French settlers and Native American tribes: Some lived on forcibly seized Native land; some were taken captive and treated as pawns in the ongoing colonization; some lost family to the fight. In their previously little-known stories is a concise picture of all that makes U.S. history remarkable and troubling.

Read: So you want to write a presidential biography

The cover of Black Fortunes
Amistad
Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Survived Slavery and Became Millionaires, by Shomari Wills

In 1848, a man named William Alexander Leidesdorff died with a fortune of more than $1.4 million, the equivalent of at least $38 million today. What makes that news historically unusual: Leidesdorff, who passed as white for most of his life, was Black. Wills traces the stories of how Leidesdorff and his peers managed to accrue wealth both before the end of slavery and during the Reconstruction era, when Black people faced intense and sometimes deadly persecution, and wealthy Black people made for particularly prominent targets. In those stories, he finds reasons for celebration, including a meaningful model of a civic-minded approach to wealth—many early Black millionaires channeled huge shares of their fortunes to advancing racial justice—as well as a significant share of injustice and tragedy. As the economic legacy of slavery continues to manifest, both in decreased wealth for Black households and baseless myths maligning Black people as inherently incapable of gaining wealth, Wills’s book is a reminder of how intensely and persistently American fortunes have been connected to the machinery of prejudice.

The cover of Akenfield
New York Review Books
Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, by Ronald Blythe

The first thing to know about Akenfield is that it doesn’t exist: It’s the pseudonym that Blythe bestowed on the East Anglian village he warmly and painstakingly portrays in this book. In giving the real place a made-up name—one thought to be a portmanteau of the names of other nearby villages—Blythe nodded to the novelistic quality of his narrative, which falls somewhere between a classic group biography and an oral history, but is rife with the vivid pleasure of daily interactions more commonly found in fiction. Blythe, who grew up in that region and spent time in the 1960s taking down the memories of his former neighbors, saw the result as a travelogue, while others considered it a work of anthropology. To read it as a biography of both a place and its people reveals other depths. Treated with the right care and knowledge, everyday people—farmhands, laborers, medical workers, one stray poet—appear as vibrant in their lives, relationships, and contributions to the world as their more glamorous peers. Akenfield drops readers into their histories and relationships, offering a rare sense of the breadth of any given life.

​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Talya Zax is the innovation editor of The Forward.



历史从来都不只是一个人的故事
一本好的团体传记以好奇心详细描述了人类相互影响的方式，包括琐碎的和巨大的。

作者：塔利亚-扎克斯
一本书的插图，封面上有一栋房子的窗户，观众可以看到里面聚集的人的剪影，正在交谈。
马特-切斯
2022年6月26日
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团体传记已经存在了几个世纪。有普鲁塔克的《贵族希腊人和罗马人的生活》，大约写于1900年前，此后一直是古典教育的主食；图尔的主教格雷戈里在六世纪为法兰克国王克洛维一世的四个令人讨厌的儿子写的传记；一众中世纪的圣徒传记将圣徒的生活和奇迹结合在一起。除了作为传记体裁的基础，现代团体传记也是历史琐事、想法以及令人高兴的八卦的绝佳来源。

让这些传记唱响的问题--是什么让这群人真正有趣，而不仅仅是值得注意的？为什么在一个人一生中的所有关系中，这些人特别有影响力？阅读一本好的团体传记，就会对人类相互影响的方式有不同程度的欣赏，无论是琐碎的还是巨大的。


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这部法典绝大多数是白人和欧洲中心主义，并可能倾向于对历史的理解，其中受过教育的人的谈话被不加批判地视为进步背后的引擎。传记的影响--今天俗称为夸张的庆祝，而不是直接的叙述--仍然很明显，特别是当没有那么多空间去了解每个人的不光彩的特征时。然而。这些书的快乐真的很了不起。这里有九本生动的、探索性的和审问性的书，可以从这里开始。

不朽的夜晚》的封面
W. W. Norton and Company
不朽的夜晚。与济慈、华兹华斯和拉姆的传奇晚餐》，作者斯坦利-普拉姆利

寻找浪漫主义时代的垃圾话？先停在这里吧。普鲁姆利是一位诗人，他采用了一种不同寻常的结构，对约翰-济慈、威廉-华兹华斯和查尔斯-兰姆，以及包括塞缪尔-泰勒-柯勒律治、自负但平庸的画家本杰明-罗伯特-海顿和散文家威廉-哈兹利特在内的一众名人进行了深入探讨。这本书讲述了一个伦敦晚宴的故事，晚宴由永远贫穷的海顿主持，其他核心人物都参加了，并从这里开始讲述他们交织的故事。这是一个令人信服、易于理解的介绍，介绍了一个继续发挥广泛影响的艺术运动背后的高度缺陷的人物，它找到了一种使其人物感人的方法。在他们的成就和个人的失败中，浪漫主义者往往比生命更重要。在普拉姆利的视野中，他们只是一些人，他们对世界和彼此的适应创造了一种丝状的亲密关系--复杂、美丽，而且容易破裂。

阅读。八位伟大艺术家充满矛盾的友谊

三位母亲》的封面
平底锅
三位母亲。马丁-路德-金、马尔科姆-X和詹姆斯-鲍德温的母亲如何塑造一个国家》，作者：安娜-马拉卡-图布斯

艾伯塔-金、路易丝-利特尔、伯迪斯-鲍德温：他们的儿子成为具有世代意义的声音，这些人物如此伟大，以至于他们的天才与他们的家庭和社区的具体影响联系在一起的程度在大众的想象中可能被忽视。塔布斯指出，这种表述不仅对这些人的工作是一种伤害--与那些被理解为具有深厚社区根基的思想相比，更容易否定那些被想象为来自孤独的改革者的思想--而且，至关重要的是，对抚养他们的妇女也是如此。在Tubbs的处理中，这些妇女最值得了解的是她们为自己的生活所做的工作，而不是她们儿子的成就。她们彼此之间非常不同，有着不同的斗争和不同的快乐，"三位母亲 "体现了并有意向她们的孩子传达了使她们引人注目的品质：坚韧不拔的精神、对不公正的清醒看法以及对平等的坚定承诺。

波西米亚的海岸》的封面
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux出版社
波西米亚的海岸。科德角的故事，1910-1960》，作者：约翰-泰勒-威廉姆斯

今天想到科德角，人们想到的第一个词不太可能是激进。但是，这个新英格兰的飞地，现在与富裕的度假者联系在一起，在20世纪的前几十年，是一个艺术和政治进步的中心。埃德娜-圣文森特-米莱（Edna St. 在这些现在被奉为美国伟人的人物中，有一连串的人物并没有因为不太出名而不值得一提。多迪-默文（Dodie Merwin）是拉尔夫-瓦尔多-爱默生（Ralph Waldo Emerson）的忠实崇拜者，成为开普敦社会生活的中心；尼娜-罗曼诺夫（Nina Romanov）是流亡的俄罗斯公主；马迪-霍尔（Mardi Hall）是一位艺术家和精心策划的派对主持人；还有更多。总的来说，海角的环境--著名的人和他们被遗忘的同伴--建立了一个永久的创造性发酵的世界，一个艺术、哲学和政治的伟大趋势从这里传播到全国各地的中心。威廉姆斯对海角的全盛时期进行了广泛而诱人的描述。你会希望自己也能在那里。

莫卡马的姐妹》的封面
维京人
莫卡马的姐妹们。为印度带来希望和治疗的先锋女性》，作者：约蒂-托塔姆

1946年，六位来自肯塔基州的修女来到印度北部小镇莫卡马，计划建立一家医院。印度已经遭受了分治的残酷影响，正处于公共卫生危机之中。当时，每1000名新生儿中就有158人在出生后的第一年死亡，疾病猖獗，而照顾人口的医生数量少得惊人。莫卡马修女》讲述了莫卡马修女；前来为她们的医院（称为拿撒勒）工作的妇女团队；以及她们培训的几代护士--包括托塔姆的母亲。她们每个人都成为印度如何从独立之初的恶劣条件下向前迈进的故事中一个小而重要的部分，特别是印度妇女如何在其彻底重塑的国家中找到新机会的故事。虽然开始这项事业的六位修女是托塔姆故事的核心，但她将同样的好奇心和同情心延伸到所有在最初20年里通过拿撒勒医院的妇女。这家医院今天仍然存在。

阅读。误解苏珊-桑塔格

致命的不和》的封面
哈珀
致命的不和。伊拉斯谟、路德和对西方思想的争夺》，作者：迈克尔-马辛

马辛著作中的核心二人组是一对自然的组合。两人都是16世纪政治、宗教和艺术动荡时期的知识分子激进分子，这是一个特别不稳定的时期，但两人在获得影响力的方法上没有什么不同。年轻的马丁-路德作为鹿特丹的伊拉斯谟（Erasmus of Rotterdam）的外交官的崇拜者开始了他动荡的职业生涯，只是后来发现这位老人的思想对于他们那个时代的要求来说太谨慎了。路德选择追求彻底的反叛，重塑了欧洲，并将他曾经的智力支柱推到了历史的风口浪尖。在某些方面，这是一个老一辈政治家和年轻新秀之间冲突的经典故事。但在马辛的巧妙处理下，它变成了一种新的反思，即历史上的巨大转变既是反复无常的--以至于一个不满的人就能使其运转起来--也是人类不安的可预见的重复功能的方式。

西贡姐妹》的封面
北伊利诺伊大学出版社
西贡姐妹》。抵抗运动中的特权妇女》，作者：帕特里夏-D-诺兰

在法国对越南的殖民统治下，一小群越南女孩在法国中学（lycées）接受教育，与殖民地精英的女儿们一起。随着革命的临近和美国干预的升级，许多人选择了离开自己的国家，逃离暴力。诺兰讲述了九个选择留下的人的故事，他们在童年时秘密地梦想着越南的独立，后来发现了令人惊讶的方式加入抵抗运动。她还讲述了在越南战争结束后，他们如何重新联系起来。最后，他们发现，他们作为儿童所经历的特权帮助他们了解到他们将要加入的斗争的重要性。他们的小团体成为自己的革命发酵源。每个人所感受到的爱国主义意识激发了其他人的热情，并使他们走上了异常勇敢的道路。"我们得出结论，"一个人说，"我们必须有我们自己的革命。

叛变的女人》的封面
基本书目
叛变的女人：法国囚犯如何成为墨西哥湾沿岸的开国母亲》，作者：琼-德让

在她们的祖国也需要一场革命，但却过早地诞生了数十年。这132名法国妇女被判定犯有小到在物资匮乏的年代偷吃藏匿的圣物的罪行，她们于1719年被非自愿地送往美国的墨西哥湾沿岸。只有62人在旅途中幸存下来，她们在抵达后发现，被称为资源丰富、发展成熟的地区，在极端情况下是具有挑战性的，而且法国定居点稀少。然而，这些妇女在她们的新环境中找到了在法国不可能找到的机会。她们工作、结婚，建立了莫比尔和新奥尔良等社区的基础，并在此过程中彼此建立了联系。她们的生活成为美国梦及其暴力的早期例子。一些妇女被奴役。其他人卷入了法国定居者和美国本土部落之间的冲突。一些人生活在强行夺取的原住民土地上；一些人被俘虏，并被当作正在进行的殖民化进程中的棋子；一些人在战斗中失去了家人。在他们以前鲜为人知的故事中，简明扼要地展现了美国历史上所有令人瞩目和不安的东西。

阅读：所以你想写一本总统传记

黑色财富》的封面
阿米斯塔德
黑人的财富》。首批六个从奴隶制中幸存下来并成为百万富翁的非裔美国人的故事》，作者：肖马利-威尔斯

1848年，一个名叫威廉-亚历山大-莱德多夫（William Alexander Leidesdorff）的人去世时拥有超过140万美元的财富，至少相当于今天的3800万美元。是什么让这个消息在历史上变得不寻常。莱德斯多夫一生中大部分时间都是以白人身份出现，但他是黑人。威尔斯追溯了莱迪多夫和他的同龄人如何在奴隶制结束前和重建时期设法积累财富的故事，当时黑人面临着激烈的、有时是致命的迫害，而富有的黑人则是特别突出的目标。在这些故事中，他发现了值得庆祝的理由，包括一个有意义的、具有公民意识的财富管理模式--许多早期的黑人百万富翁将其财富的巨大份额用于促进种族公正--同时也有相当一部分不公正和悲剧。随着奴隶制的经济遗产继续显现，无论是黑人家庭财富的减少，还是将黑人诋毁为天生无法获得财富的毫无根据的神话，威尔斯的书都提醒我们，美国的财富与偏见的机制是多么强烈和持久地联系在一起。

阿肯菲尔德》的封面
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阿肯菲尔德。一个英国村庄的肖像》，罗纳德-布莱思著

关于阿肯菲尔德，首先要知道的是它并不存在。这是布莱斯为他在本书中热情洋溢地描绘的东安格利亚村庄所取的假名。布莱思给这个真实的地方起了一个新的名字--一个被认为是附近其他村庄名字的组合--他的叙述具有小说般的质量，它介于经典团体传记和口述历史之间，但充满了小说中更常见的日常互动的生动乐趣。布莱斯在该地区长大，并在20世纪60年代花时间记下了他以前邻居的记忆，他把这个结果看作是一本游记，而其他人则认为这是一部人类学作品。把它作为一个地方及其人民的传记来读，会发现其他的深度。在适当的关怀和知识的处理下，普通人--农夫、工人、医务工作者、一位流浪的诗人--在他们的生活、关系和对世界的贡献方面显得和他们更有魅力的同行一样充满活力。阿肯菲尔德将读者带入他们的历史和关系中，提供了一种罕见的对任何特定生活的广度的感觉。

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