Are there any plans to put the American National Biography online?
Garraty: Yes, there are. That’s going to happen — partly because it opens up a way of keeping the whole dictionary up to date. Our current book is the way American history looks today. In the year 2020 or 2030, there will be different ways of looking at the past. And we can at least keep the book up to date by adding names as people die. That is important for so many reasons. It’s hard to know how important a person was right after death. What I was saying about Reconstruction is just the most extreme case of that. So when the dictionary is online, it will be possible to integrate names into the biography without having an actual supplement. Ferris: There’s a phrase for this project: “The life of a nation is told by the lives of its people.” The emphasis that the American National Biography puts on individuals comes at a time when many historians are turning away from writing biographies. What is the relationship you see between history and biography? Garraty: A biography is the histo
