What is the importance of the lesser known people in psychology and recording their histories?
History has not always been about lesser people—that’s a rather modern invention. I remember reading a book a few years ago that was based on the diaries of women who crossed the prairies in the 1840s and 1850s (Schlissel, 1982). None of these women were important women in the sense that they made names for themselves in any way, but they had kept accounts of their travels. Someone had taken the diaries of quite a number of these women and put them together into a very interesting narrative of what that life was like. As you can imagine, that’s incredibly revealing for a lot of reasons. There are a lot of studies now in which people write about the invisible people, and they are made visible. These writings give people, who have not had a voice in history, exactly that. The lives of these people are very instructive about periods of our history because they give insights into history that aren’t available from any other kinds of sources. Without them, we’d just have a partial view of h
