There's a weird article by Jill Lepore, "Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography", in the Journal of American History, June 2001. She was doing research on Noah Webster and found a lock of his hair in the archives. She talks about how the intimacy of this item drew her closer to her subject, and goes on to discuss the risks of writing biography. It's unusually personal.

Practicing history by Barbara Tucuman talks a lot about her personal views on being an historian.

I just read Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft and really enjoyed it. It's definitely flawed--he wrote it while fighting for the French Resistance and didn't have the resources to do any accurate sourcing--but it's an interesting look into his approach to history and offers a slice of the field's evolution during the 20th century.

"Death of William Gooch" by Greg Denning; he goes a lot into the circumstance and happenstance that historians deal with in their research. He also talks a lot about his views on history and anthropology and how they can combine. Definitely one of my favorite history books. As Denning reconstructs the world of William Gooch; a Cambridge grad who took a commission sailing across the Pacific only to die on the North Shore of Oahu (Hawaii). Part of the book is related to Gooch and his story, but much of it is Denning exploring what is means to (re)create the past or (re)present an event. He is one of the best in my mind at discussing the symbolic importance of events and the meanings embedded within them. He is also remarkably easy to read.

Definitely recommend "A Passion for History: Natalie Zemon Davis, Conversations With Denis Crouzet." It is a series of conversations between the two historians edited for publication. It goes into depth on Davis's life and her relationship to history and historical scholarship, what sort of challenges she faces in doing history, what sort of opportunities she looks for, and how in general she approaches archival work.

Historical scholars, like maniacs and fetishists who devoted themselves to their obsessions, described a work experience far different from that of ordinary people. Historians spoke of soaring above the common herd by their assiduous veneration and appreciation of a manuscript's true value. "Happiness for me is not just pleasure; I have renounced it . . . My object is the good, or Being," the young Hippolyte Taine wrote a friend. He claimed kinship not with people of his own day but with men in the past, "Greek and ancient." Other historians described stripping away the extraneous aspects of life such as social engagements, pleasure trips, and amusements to practice the higher devotion to documents. "I am predestined for solitude. Wherever I am, I will be alone," wrote Ranke, frequenter of salons and museums and companion of lovely young women. Mandell Creighton, who revised scholarship on the popes with the addition of cultural material, wrote tirelessly to his fiancee about Entsagung, or renunciation. Creighton questioned the value of interacting with other humans when scholarly reality was so important, and he hoped to lead a luminescent life distinct from the quotidian. Critical scholarship could be brutal, but its demands led its practitioners to articulate a heightened, elated sensibility that bespoke transcendence. The sensibility that soared to the farthest reaches of universality was the opposite of ordinary interests and biases, making the idealistic language of historical objectivity parallel the language of fetishistic love.

From the extremely interesting article by Bonnie G. Smith, "Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar and Archival Research in the Nineteenth Century," American Historical Review 100, No. 4 (October 1995), 1150-1176. The article looks at the history of the historical "seminar," the genesis of modern (Rankean) archival research practices in the 19th century, and the gendered nature of these early practices. Pretty interesting stuff, and a perspective on the "history of history" that I had not seen prior to reading it (in, gasp, a history seminar).

Jan Vansina's Living with Africa (1994) is about the birth of African history as a serious subdiscipline, the emergence of Wisconsin's legendary program, and so forth. I'm one of his "grandchildren," so I found it quite interesting, although of course it carries his own personal views on the process. Toyin Falola's A Mouth Sweeter than Salt is also quite good, but more personal.

I like Mary Lindemann's 1992 essay "Confessions of an Archive Junkie."

I would recommend J.G.A. Pocock's The Discovery of Islands, specifically its first chapter, "The Antipodean Perception".

Two points to go along with this. First, in the fields of early modern European history, philosophy of history, and the history of ideas, Pocock is a very important figure. He has written many trenchant and brilliant essays and books, the most well known of which are probably The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, The Machiavellian Moment, and Politics, Language, and Time. (If you're well acquainted with all of this, I apologize for assuming otherwise!).

Second, this particular essay is him in a reflective mood, writing about his own past (from New Zealand to Cambridge to Hopkins), how that has shaped his present and his orientation as an historian, and the role that his work and history itself in general has had on people and how they understand their place.

Here is the opening paragraph:

This introductory essay must be initially autobiographical; to explain what it is to write history from New Zealand I need to explain how I came to do it, and place myself in context as a transitory figure in the history of historiography. It is relevant to what I have to say in these essays that I am of settler descent in the fourth generation, and relevant also that though I write as a New Zealander, I write as that not uncommon phenomenon, a New Zealand expatriate. It would take a long time to explain why this is one way of being a New Zealander.

A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society by Geoff Eley is an intellectual autobiography wherein Eley, a prominent historian of modern Germany, attempts to square his own development as a historian within the wider currents of the development of history as a discipline from the 1960s to the 1990s.

J. H. Elliott's History in the Making is another good autobiography by one of the doyens of early modern Spanish history. It is less theoretically orientated than the Eley text, but also a degree more accessible and personal.

The opening chapter of Carl Schorske's Thinking With History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism has an interesting and illuminating autobiography. One of the interesting things about this selection is that it shows Schorske's reminisces about the long gestation for his opus Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, which producing work in fits and starts is sometimes the path that historians find themselves on in their careers.

• John Lewis Gaddis' The Landscape of History offers an interesting and genial look at the historian's craft considered specifically as a human occupation -- that is, as something done by humans and done for humans. It's short, punchy, widely available, and a pleasure to read.

• Less accessible, but still very important: Peter Novick's influential That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession. This remarkable volume examines the ways in which historians (specifically American ones, but still) have grappled with the problem of how best to portray the past. The shadow of Von Ranke hangs heavy over the profession -- with its attendant focus on "showing the past as it really was" -- and Novick's text is based on the correspondence and writings of dozens of major historians as they have considered what it means to go about their work.