ABSTRACT
Two decades before the "historians' autobiographical turn" promoted by French ego-historians in the 1980s, some American historians born between 1885 and 1905 decided to narrate their lives, publishing these texts at the ends of their careers. This chapter discusses about the American historians. It explains that They were the first generation of historians who conceived the autobiographical exercise as a part of professional training and fulfilment as historians, as Taylor's epigraph for this chapter clearly highlights. The chapter explains the prevalence of biographical approaches is the different level of the professionalization in the field of history, consolidated in the United States before Europe. Thus, biographical autobiographers were the first to systematically explore the interplay between personal experience and the writing of history, since humanistic autobiographers tended to deploy more general and abstract approaches to life writing. They consolidated autobiography among historians, providing it with the necessary conventionality to become an orthodox professional practice and avoiding its label of exceptionality.
