History, when done well, is an appeal to the mind, and is about debate, contingency and questioning received wisdoms in ways that deepen our appreciation and understanding of who we are and why and how we did certain things, and perhaps even allows us to learn.

The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in the void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom—or rather the movement toward it—that counts. “Good writing has two characteristics,” a gifted teacher of writing once said. “It’s alive on the page and the reader is persuaded that the writer is on a voyage of discovery.

Like Toni Morrison, Barbara Tuchman talked and wrote extensively about her specific practices; she even wrote a whole book on her methods, Practicing History.

By its very nature, this study relies on people with highly visible accomplishments. I worry that some readers might misinterpret this as an implicit worthiness hierarchy that valorizes achieving fame over taking more unseen paths. I also worry that some of the people in the study can feel so unapproachable in what they made of their lives that readers might discount the relevance of learning from them, or be left wondering, “Well, their lives are interesting, but could I ever do what they did?” I share that feeling. Studying Charles Colson made me feel somewhat intimidated by the standard he lived to after prison.

As Carl Van Doren wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Franklin, “He had wanted wealth only that he might be free, and to be free only that he might be useful.