History, the historian, and an autobiography

It is perhaps unsurprising that the historian who has done more than most to address the issue of ego-histoire would examine the connections between history and autobiography in his Invitation. This narrative of his youthful and college years in the mid to late 1960s, being taught by Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis, learning to pursue history from Geoffrey Barraclough, all against the background of the Vietnam War and his move to Berkeley, is as fascinating as autobiography as it is instructive as history. His intellectual position, somewhere between Carl Schorske and Jacques Derrida, makes for a compelling personal intellectual history.