Books by Jennifer Jensen Wallach

Although historians frequently use memoirs as source material, too often they confine such usage to the anecdotal, and there is little methodological literature regarding the genre. This study articulates an approach to using memoirs as instruments of historical understanding.

How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture tells the story of America by examining American eating habits, and illustrates the many ways in which competing cultures, conquests and cuisines have helped form America's identity, and have helped define what it means to be American.

Argues that the field of autobiography studies, which is dominated by literary critics, needs a theoretical framework that allows historians, too, to benefit from the interpretation of life writing.