ABSTRACT Anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and journalists all talk to people to learn about their lives. Yet, while anthropologists and sociologists tend to craft pseudonyms for their narrators and disguise or fabricate details to prevent re-identification, journalists and historians prefer to use real names. To explain this divergence, this article offers the stories of two books born out of the 1960s and early 1970s, a moment when history and the social sciences were unusually close. The two books, The Nazi Seizure of Power by William Sheridan Allen, and All God’s Dangers by Theodore Rosengarten, featured pseudonyms for people and places that soon after were publicly identified by others. So far as anonymity is concerned, they failed. Yet as books, they have proven successes, remaining in print and on syllabi decades after publication. I suggest that this is not a coincidence, and that the pseudonyms in these two books are more than futile efforts to protect individuals’ identities. Rather, they may reflect an openness to other genres – anthropology, sociology, and even literature – that enriched their writing and expanded their impact. While I would not go so far as to recommend pseudonyms to today’s historians, the power of these two books can remind us to tell the biggest stories we can.

中文翻译：

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采访每个人：威廉·谢里丹·艾伦，西奥多·罗森加滕和假名历史的魅力

摘要人类学家，社会学家，历史学家和新闻工作者都在与人们交谈，以了解他们的生活。然而，尽管人类学家和社会学家倾向于为叙述者制作假名，并伪装或捏造细节以防止重新识别，但新闻工作者和历史学家更喜欢使用真实姓名。为了解释这种差异，本文提供了两本书的故事，这两本书出自1960年代和1970年代初，当时历史和社会科学异常接近。这两本书，威廉·谢里丹·艾伦（William Sheridan Allen）的《纳粹夺取政权》和西奥多·罗森加滕（Theodore Rosengarten）的《全神的危险》（All God's Dangers），都为人们和地方提供了化名，不久之后便被其他人公开鉴定。就匿名而言，他们失败了。然而，作为书籍，它们已被证明是成功的，出版后几十年仍在印刷版和教学大纲中保留下来。我建议这不是一个巧合，并且这两本书中的化名不仅仅是保护个人身份的徒劳努力。相反，它们可能反映出对其他类型的开放性-人类学，社会学甚至文学-丰富了他们的写作并扩大了他们的影响力。尽管我不愿意向当今的历史学家推荐假名，但这两本书的强大功能可以提醒我们讲最大的故事。