Microhistory

Some rough notes about microhistory after discussion of rothman2015 in HIST 588.

While debates about micro- versus macro-history concentrate on differences in scale, in a way both methods retain a preference for chronological narrative at their core.

But does the narrative structure of most microhistories (in Rothman’s case, a five-act, five-chapter drama) impose a coherence on lived experience that works against the goal of some microhistorians to foreground subjectivity, messiness, unevenness, incoherence?

Even if it does, are there other ways to do this? Other narrative (or non-narrative) strategies? Perhaps the microhistory equivalent of prosopography/collective biography? Several stories juxtaposed without attempting to link them up? (Sort of like the John Smith episode of This American Life? Or Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles, mentioned by Keith?) Something involving new media?

What about a more novelistic approach in which chapters alternate the perspectives of different characters (sort of like Von Frank’s book on Anthony Burns), or include flashbacks that spotlight what people knew or thought they knew at particular moments? What about Jonathan Spence’s dream sequences in the The Death of Woman Wang? Or the emphasis in Wendy Warren’s article on the unknowns of a story?

Another question is whether microhistories of slavery tend towards lives that end on a relative high note, stories of success like Rose Herera’s? What would it look like to have more stories that end like Kevin Boyle’s Arc of Justice? Or Sweet’s Dominguez Alvarez? Or James Green’s Death in Haymarket (a suggestion from Keith)? Or darker stories in Rothman’s book, like Juana’s?

How much interpretive weight do we put on people’s stories? More burden than they can or should bear? As Keith pointed out, to the person living a life, enduring triumph or tragedy, how much does it matter whether that life is “representative” or some bigger story or unique? How much do our metanarratives about the relative weight of change and continuity in the history of emancipation depend on which individual cases we decide to focus on (or on whether we focus on individual lives at all, in contrast to the overarching legal or political story)?

Why Microhistory?

Possible answers:

  • reach different audiences
  • mobilize different political responses
  • “dramatize” so as to make history more vivid
  • spotlight difficulty of constructing subaltern lives, and thereby illuminate broader systems of power (see peabody2012)
  • “materialize the individual subject as a locus of discursive and environmental forces while forcing attention to a trajectory rather than a place, and to what Caroline Merithew calls the “slippery” identity of subjects in motion”1
  • engage critically with historiographical trends and pressures towards writing in certain ways, as evidenced by the initial goals of the microhistorians
  • matter of preference? portrait over landscape, a la Lepore?
  • cast light on broader patterns through the “exceptionally normal”

But with regard to this last point, see boothburton2009:

As has often been the case in the last quarter of a century, with the arrival of “new” subjects to the sightline of history—women, workers, people of color, and children—claims about their capacity to do more than simply illuminate their own lives continues to exert a defining influence on what counts as History (capital H). One might ask whether this insistence on individuals’ life histories as emblematic of broader connections is either specific to historians or necessarily to the benefit of biography as a genre.

Christopher Hodson’s review of Scott and Hebrard’s Freedom Papers in the Winter 2015 issue of the Journal of the Early Republic also notes a difference between the early European microhistorians and American practitioners:

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Italian pioneers of microhistory tended to focus on the constraints imposed by powerful institutions on individual freedom (Menocchio, after all, gets killed by his inquisitors at the end of The Cheese and the Worms). But, as Karl Appuhn has noted, American historians who seized on their methods have often emphasized the subversive agency of subaltern peoples “at the expense of structure.” Strangely, history on a grand scale has followed a similar pattern. Where historians once traced out the expression of power through imperial or colonial frameworks, Atlantic historians have often painted with the American microhistorians’ brush on a larger canvas, highlighting the unpredictable, ungovernable realities of cultural interaction.2

Grab Bag

Some other recent links and tweets that have gotten me thinking about these things:

Tweets

  1. Quote from boothburton2009.↩

  2. Christopher Hodson, Review of Freedom Papers, Journal of the Early Republic 35, no. 4 (Winter 2015), 679. His reference to Karl Appuhn cites “Microhistory” entry in Encyclopedia of European Social History from 1350 to 2000, ed. Peter N. Stearns (New York, 2001), 110.↩