Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I consider myself a writer who happens to write about history, rather than a historian. I was an English major in college. What I've learned about history is in the field, so to speak. Going into the archives and working with it directly.
What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.
It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
I find there's a thin, permeable membrane between journalism and history, and though some academic historians take a dim view of it, I gather a lot of strength and professional inspiration from passing back and forth across it.
As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.
History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.
I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical.
Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.
Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.