Introduction: Where the Hell are the People?

It is something of a truism that the pendulum of academic fashion swings between the macro and micro levels of investigation and interpretation. From the majestic sweep of Braudel's Mediterranean to the simple mill of Ginzburg's Menocchio or from the towering height of Shirer's rise and fall to Browning's mud-level investigation of ordinary men, historians continue to readjust the scope of their focus in an attempt to better understand the past.¹ As post-modernism challenged the dominance of Marxian and quantitative approaches to social history, inquiry often shifted from broad, societal-level questions to those which explored the intersections of mentalities and the social in individuals and small groups. An argument could be made that the pendulum is swinging towards a grander scale once again as universities increasingly respond to globalization by replacing western civilization classes with those focusing on world civilizations. The increased interest in the history of the Atlantic world, while not as structural as earlier world systems approaches, nonetheless privileges the macro over the micro.² Yet even within this recent historiography, as Richard Grassby's impressively researched exploration of the role of personal relationships in the English-dominated world of business has shown us, the history of family and kinship remains a vital strategy for making sense of large historical processes, in this case, that of emergent capitalism in the making of the Atlantic world.³

Conversely, for more than two decades now, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities has served as a benchmark for historical scholarship seeking to understand the development of nationalism in the West.⁴ This work, and all that it has inspired, investigated the cultural processes by which groups of strangers come to belong to a national community, albeit still as strangers to one another. While the significance and influence of this history are undoubted, the focus on national communities has rendered invisible the tangible contact between individuals who create their own communities through the establishment and maintenance of interpersonal relationships. In contrast to the manner in which the imagined community of the nation is often the result of action being taken upon a specific people, the essays in this issue explore the active participation of individuals in the creation and maintenance of the social dynamics that comprise their varied communities without denying the social structures that systemically frame their actions, even those of national identity.

The articles of this special issue seek to interact with this debate by exploring the manner in which personal relationships and, in turn, the interpersonal nature of community and identity on a local level, have significantly influenced subjects which are frequently conceived of in much broader, impersonal terms, such as migration, urban poverty, nationality, imperialism, state institutions, and the Great War. The approaches herein utilize the interpersonal nature of social interaction specific to individuals to reflect on larger issues of historical concern. In other words, the focus here is on how individuals and groups have rendered their lives meaningful through relationships with others, whether it is within a family, friendship, ethnicity, interest-group, community or polity. Interpersonal relationships are the fundamental framework of the social world and structure the daily lives of those living within them. Importantly, these relations are not fixed, but are fluid and determined by human agency.

If we agree on the specificity of historical context and that change is the greatest continuity of all, then as those who study the human past, we must recognize how people shaped their own worlds. Social life is created and recreated through the activities of individuals as social actors while the impact of their actions is largely limited to their immediate social world: their friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. Yet, of course, this takes place within particular contexts. It is the challenge of cultural history to place the individual within these larger social and political worlds. We as social and cultural historians have had a tendency to focus on masses. We lump individuals of the past into large social groups that would probably look unfamiliar to those under study. How much are people today concerned...