What are the strengths and limitations for using biographies and autobiographies as historical sources?
They should be a source but bear in mind that they are often subjectively and not always objectively written. For example the right-wing historian David Irving has written approvingly about Adolf Hitler, while others have tended to be a lot more critical. If you had never heard of Adolf Hitler and read only David Irving’s biography you might consider him to be a very different character to the one that most people portray him as. The wisest thing to do is to cross reference biographies/history books and use more than one source, that way you can get a better and more informed opinion and you’ll also form that opinion yourself. The strengths of using biographies are that you very often get a direct focus on an event that is of interest to you and the biographer might give an event more depth and detail than a general history book would and perhaps give it a human slant.
