“Often the biography shelf is longer than the history shelf” at bookstores, said Queens College professor Josh Freeman on Friday, opening a panel of historians discussing biography. He was at Columbia University this weekend for the Conference on New York State History, held in conjunction with the Association of Public Historians of New York State.

Historians, tour guides, archivists, and interested others from around the state came to this conference, sponsored by the New York State Archives Partnership Trust and the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History at Columbia University.

Not only might this be a golden age of the short biography (as in James Atlas’s series which spawned other series), Mr. Freeman said, but also a golden age of the very long biography as well.

Columbia University professor Richard Bushman, who wrote “Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), said when he was growing up, biography was seen as a kind of second-rank history but was surprised to see that about 20% of Bancroft Prizes in history over the years have been given for biographies.

Mr. Bushman said biographies give a reader a close-up view of actual historical reality: “It gets us into a place” that can offer “fine-grained detail.”

He said the chronology of a person’s life is a terrific frame upon which the biographer can hang a lot of other things. In the case of Smith: reform, theology, race, millennialism, etc. All these things, he said, “swirl around his life.” Mr. Bushman said biography allows the weaving of these various sub-themes into the main narrative and that the historian’s task is to recreate the world as the subject saw it.

“I’m a historian not a biographer,” said David Nasaw, who is at work on a biography of Andrew Carnegie. Mr. Nasaw said that for historians, their logic, knowledge and organizational principle are chronological, “in time and over time.” With biography, he said, the organization is laid out in advance “you can pay attention to trying to be a writer.”

Mr. Nasaw saw the role of a historian who writes biography as that of one who “sweeps away the fables, the myths, the stories.” Duane Tananbaum of Lehman College later said his biographical subject, Herbert Lehman, was not a particularly colorful person. The audience laughed when he said, “I wish I had the myths to demolish.”

Mr. Nasaw said when one finds great materials such as letters, there is a danger in the biographer getting “swept away” and letting the materials tell the story. “You want to tell the story. You don’t want the story to tell you.”

Mr. Nasaw said as a historian, he is against “foreshadowing,” such as saying as a person like Carnegie headed out in 1848 and “would return a rich man.”

He also said it was not the historian’s task to stand in judgment of the figures he writes about; not play the role of moralizer or theologian. He said one counterintuitive thing that surprised him was that once Carnegie decided to give away his money, “he became a more brutal capitalist.”

Most amusingly, Mr. Nasaw said, Carnegie was short and seldom (perhaps about twice) let himself be photographed next to a person. He was typically either sitting down or in a group photo, at the top of the stairs.

Speaking last, Columbia University provost Alan Brinkley talked about his first biography, that of Henry Luce, a missionary’s son who went on to build a journalism empire.

He spoke about Time magazine, which Luce co-founded as a digest of the news for busy people. Mr. Brinkley also discussed Fortune magazine, which in its early years was an unconventional vehicle to “understanding all of society.” For example, James Agee was sent to write on sharecroppers in the south, although his account was not published there but in a now-famous book with Walker Evans called “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”

Through his publishing enterprise, Luce had an impact on American public discourse, Mr. Brinkley said.

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PLAYS AND PENSEURS Verse Theater Manhattan’s Plays About Poets series featured a reading recently of Jonathan Leaf’s “The Germans in Paris,” which portrays the political and personal lives of poet Heinrich Heine, composer Richard Wagner, and radical Karl Marx in Paris in the 1850s.

Ross Beschler, who plays Marx, once played a young Sigmund Freud in the play “Dear Vienna.” At one point, Heine challenges Marx, “How can you make a better man without first being one?”

gshapiro@nysun.com