Wasfi al-Tall: An Iconic Incarnation of Jordanianism

History and biography often have been at odds. The writing of modern history has tended to shy away from the biography of the “great man” as historical inquiry shifted from the elite to the masses and from politics to society. Some were inclined even to argue that the emphasis on society meant that biography was not really history at all. This rather extreme approach eventually gave way to a revaluation of biography in the works of historians and a “new willingness . . . to see whether biography can produce a fuller and richer representation of the past.”¹ It was