Microhistory

Microhistory is an approach to history that takes as its subject an especially small, well-defined, clearly delimited unit, in order to demonstrate larger points or examine larger issues. For instance, microhistories may take as their subject a single community, a single event like a natural disaster, or a single battle (or single day of a battle) in a war. Unlike case studies, microhistories are not defined only by their scale but by their motivation, which is to tease out the larger issues visible in the limited subject. For instance, the influential historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard University, though best known for the statement, "Well-behaved women seldom make history," has been awarded most of the discipline of history’s major honors for her work on the lives of New England women in the early American republic. Ulrich’s work is emblematic of that of many scholars who identify as microhistorians, in that it examines the private lives of individuals in order to uncover truths about the larger culture they inhabit.

Background

As a movement in the field of history, microhistory began in Italy in the 1970s. The prolonged economic boom that raised the standard of living for working- and middle-class Italians in the 1950s and 1960s had come to a dramatic end by the close of the 1960s, which saw widespread social unrest and massive labor strikes in response to worsening economic and political conditions. The 1970s saw regular problems with Italian domestic terrorism and other social and political problems, and a crumbling of the country’s post–World War II recovery from fascism. It was in this context that Italian historians such as Carlo Ginzburg became disillusioned with prevailing approaches to history. Elsewhere in the West, other historians were parting ways with traditionalist approaches: postcolonialists like Edward Said examined the nature of power relations that sustained colonialism, Howard Zinn published his influential A People’s History of the United States, and the new labor history movement focused on the history of workers rather than the history of unions. Many of these were grouped together as "revisionists": revising the traditional view of history, which had tended to be written from the "victors’" point of view and even to support ideas like manifest destiny.

This is not to say that microhistory as an approach requires adherence to any political persuasion or sympathy with any of the above movements within the field of history. One of the motivations behind microhistory was distinctly apolitical: the tendency for traditional history to describe history in terms of large, sweeping statements, ignoring individual cases that contradicted those statements.

Though there are many works that could retrospectively be called microhistories, one of the first by a self-described microhistorian is Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976). Ginzburg’s work is a biography of a sixteenth-century miller named Menocchio, who was eventually burned at the stake as a heretic because of his unorthodox religious teachings. Ginzburg examines one life in order to explore the history of education, literacy, and ideas, exploring how Menocchio developed and defended his ideas and how and why they were condemned in order to discuss the larger world of ideas and attitudes in the sixteenth century as a whole.

Overview

Like Ginzburg’s work, some microhistories study a single individual, but are distinguished from conventional biographies in that their subjects are ordinary people, as opposed to the prominent figures in politics or culture that are the subjects of conventional "Great Man" histories. Thus, microhistories focusing on individuals tend to align with the concerns of social history, otherwise known as "history from below" or "people’s histories"—histories taking the perspective of the common or even marginalized person rather than famous leaders.

Microhistory quickly spread beyond Italy, and in the twenty-first century there are many different approaches to it. American writer Mark Kurlansky helped introduce microhistory to a popular audience with Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (1997), and has contributed similar histories of salt, oysters, and the fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, as well as children’s versions of his salt and cod books. Simon Winchester is among several popular historians who have written microhistories of specific events, including the 1883 eruption of the volcano Krakatoa and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. A related approach several historians have taken is to write a history of a single year, one that can be examined in such a way as to illustrate larger historical trends that "pass through" it. There are several books about 1816, for instance, the "year without a summer" as a result of the Tambora volcano eruption the previous year. Other microhistories are new approaches to the history of ideas or intellectual history, examining the history of a particular well-defined concept—such as the way that color terminology has developed over time, or the history of sleeping habits. Microhistories have exploded in the book market, with books released on a large variety of topics, from the history of butter to the search for Indigo.

One of the key methods in microhistory is "thick description," a term coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle and popularized by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Where the traditional historical narratives against which microhistorians reacted were thin on detail, thick description by contrast is detail heavy. But those details are employed with purpose, in contrast to the earlier romantic historians of the eighteenth century who sought only to evoke a mood: thick description is the careful use of meticulous detail in order to provide greater context and meaning. In its original usage, in anthropology, Geertz was concerned with descriptions of behavior, and describing not just what was being done but how and why it was being done.

Microhistory has also been influenced by the Annales school, a group of French historians that coalesced in the early twentieth century. The Annales school (named for the journal Annales in which these historians prominently published) is concerned with social history, and at the time of the Italian microhistorians, it especially emphasized the history of "mentalites" or attitudes, such as those portrayed in Ginzburg’s work. However, the Annales school eventually found itself at odds with some microhistorians as well. Heavily invested in the history of attitudes, it is all but disdainful of the history of events, and hostile to the class-based approach of "history from below." For much of the twentieth century, the Annales school held significant sway over the field of history and its teaching in France, but its international influence has waned since the 1970s.

Bibliography

Alquist, Pierce. "50 Must-Read Microhistory Books." Book Riot, 14 Nov. 2018, bookriot.com/must-read-microhistory-books/. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025. 

Davis, Natalie Zemon.The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. Print.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.

Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. 1976. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. Print.

Green, Anna, and Kathleen Troup, eds. The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth Century History and Theory. New York: New York UP, 1999. Print.

Klingaman, William, and Nicholas Klingaman. The Year without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History. New York: St. Martin’s, 2013. Print.

Magnusson, Sigurour Gylfi, and Istvan M. Szijarto. What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2013.

McComiskey, Bruce, ed. Microhistories of Composition. Salt Lake City: Utah State UP, 2016. Print.

"Microhistory: Home." University at Buffalo, 8 Jan. 2024, research.lib.buffalo.edu/microhistory. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025. 

Stewart, George. Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Attack at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863. Boston: Houghton, 1959. Print.

Winchester, Simon. A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. New York: Harper, 2005. Print.