Microhistory is the intensive historical investigation of a well-defined smaller unit of research, most often a single event, the community of a village, a family or a person. In its ambition, however, microhistory can be distinguished from a simple case study as microhistory aspires to “search for answers to large questions in small places” (in the words of Charles Joyner). Microhistory thus, has links with local history and oral history. It resembles local history as its subject-matter is often confined to a community or a locality. The oral sources, folk tales and legends, are also used extensively by the microhistorians.
The original idea of writing microhistory came from Italy in the 1970s. Microstoria had a social history and a cultural history wing. Carlo Ginzburg, a famous historian associated with microhistory, traces the first use of the term to an American scholar, George R. Stewart. In his book, Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Charge at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863 (1959), Stewart has used the term. In 1968, Luis Gonzalez used the term ‘microhistory’ in the subtitle of his book which deals with the changes experienced over four centuries by a small village in Mexico. Gonzalez also said the term ‘microhistory’ was used in 1960 by Fernand Braudel. For Braudel, the term had a negative connotation and synonymous with the ‘history of events’. The word also was used in a novel by Raymond Queneau in 1965. In 1975, the term appeared in Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table (1975). For this, the word came to be used extensively for certain kind of historical practice. Geovanni Levi was the first Italian historian to extensively use ‘microhistory’.
In Italy, during the 1970s and the 1980s, microhistory emerged as a conceivable historical practice. It is the Italian microhistorians who set most of the agenda for writing this version of history. Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi, Carlo Poni, Edoardo Grendi and Gianna Pomata are some of the Italian historians who made the word famous through their writings. The Italian journal Quaderni Storici, since its foundation in 1966, has served as the medium for this trend in history-writing.
Microhistory is regarded as a postmodern response to the problems of modern historiography. The microhistorians were critical of not only the Rankean paradigm, but also the microhistorical paradigms developed by Marxism, the Annales School and the old social history.
It had a significant impact on French and German historians in the 1980s and 1990s. Microhistory became then a popular approach and it produced classics in several languages. Microhistory is part of a wider trend which includes intensive local and individual studies by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in France, Hans Medick in Germany and Robert Darnton and Natalie Zamon Davis in the United States
The microhistorians define their historiographical practice against approach of the analytical social science, metahistory of Marxism and the non-human grand history of the Annales School.
The microhistorians were critical of the grand narratives and the social scientific studies not because these approaches were wrong but because they did not capture the reality at the micro level. Thus, microhistory is a late modern response to the problems of modern historiography, which focuses on big structures, large processes and huge comparisons.
Microhistorians believed that the modern trend of historiography is distorting the reality at the small level. Thus, on the contrary, they focused on the small units and people living in those units. They felt that this would lead to better understanding of reality at the small level. They believed that it is at the small level that the real nature of various values and beliefs held by people may be revealed. Historians Giovanni Levi and Roger Chartier advocated these views.
However, the microhistorians retain three elements of the Marxist theory of history. They believe the social and economic inequality exists in all societies, the culture is not autonomous but is associated with economic forces and history is nearer to social sciences than to poetry.
Methodologically, at Levi said, microhistory is characterized as a practice based on the reduction of the scale of observation, on a microscopic analysis and an intensive study of the documentary material. The microhistorians believe that it is only at the small level that the real nature of various values and beliefs held by people may be reveled.
Cultural anthropologists, led by Clifford Geertz, also adopted the study of the small scale which influenced the works of some of the microhistorians. However, there were some differences between the two. Firstly, these microhistorians gave more importance to theory than what these anthropologists did. Secondly, they criticize a homogenous conception of culture in the works of these anthropologists and next, they were not willing to go far in the direction of relativism.
Thus microhistory, as summarized by Levi, features the reduction of scale, the debate about rationality, the small clue as scientific paradigm, the role of the particular (not in opposition to the social), the attention to reception and narrative, a specific definition of context and the rejection of relativism.
But all microhistorians are not similar in their approach and objectives. There were wide differences among them. For example, while Levi is much closer to the analytical history and believes history as a social science and not a work of art, Gianna Pomata believes that history matches to works of art in terms of vitality and intensity of vision.
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