Biography
Biography
Midterm Exam
Parke thoughts on biography were very interesting to me. At first, I had trouble understanding her points but as I read on it made more sense to me. She write about American and British author. Parke, Strassmaier and Jean Edward Smith had similar ideas about biography. They told the good and the bad. Parke surveys biography from classical times to the present, focusing her analysis on Western culture.
Dr. Strassmaier notes that we tend to stray away from including the bad thoughts at times, maybe not realizing that the good and bad could teach us an invaluable moral lesson. He credits Shirley Tanzer for her insight on the effect and affects that each life plays in a biography. Strassmaier quotes Dilthey; "How can one deny that biography is of outstanding significance for the understanding of the great context of the historical world...". To continue in his justification of the importance of biography in the realm of historical research and writing, Dr. Strassmaier also relies on Erick Erikson, who is acknowledged as the father of psycho-history. In attempting to understand the influence of people on history, such as Martin Luther and Gandhi, Erikson found it extremely important to attempt to understand their whole lives, delving back to their formative years in an effort to understand what drove them in their later years. Erickson found it extremely important to focus on the entire life cycle of his studies of historical features.
Jean Edward Smith he should paraphrase H.L.Mencken’s couplet that military biography is to biography as military music is to music. Actually, there may be a difference if one is dealing with a figure whose accomplishments lie exclusively in the military: a Jackson or Sheridan, for example, or a Patton or Schwartzkopf. In those cases, war and battles consume the narrative, and there is little room for the contextual description that allows an author to comment on the times, the political...
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