Big Questions in Microhistory

Last year, the historian Jill Lepore gave an interview in which she lamented the "retreat of humanists from public life" and claimed that "the academy is largely itself responsible for its own peril."¹ A number of historians on Twitter immediately struck back, including Carole Emberton ("Everywhere I look there are humanists of all stripes—writers, artists, academics—engaging with public life in a variety of forms") and Tom Sugrue ("it's a veritable golden age for historians engaging the wide public"). Lawrence Glickman added that it was absurd to blame the academy for its own marginalization, considering the effects of the loss of state funding and of corporatization in higher education. And Holly Genovese even questioned whether Lepore herself was truly engaging with "the public," considering that "her main contribution to public scholarship has been her tenure writing at The New Yorker," which "might be 'a public' but it certainly doesn't reach the kind of audiences that say, AARP magazine or Southern Living does."²

The interview clearly struck a nerve. It gestured at a question that has roiled academic historians for the last several years: how to get the public to care about, or even hear about, all of the important, exciting work that historians are doing?

Enter microhistory. Perhaps the simplest definition comes from Barry Reay, who wrote of "historical research on a reduced scale, under the microscope so to speak."³ Microhistory is more intensive and focused than a survey, more far-reaching in its implications than a case study, and more centered on those at "the bottom" than most biographies. It utilizes a single life or incident to make a broader point about society. It is one of the most powerful methodologies that historians have to engage with the public, tell a story, and still make an argument about the past and the present. And, contrary to Lepore's claim, many historians have realized that. As a field that emerged out of the New Social History movement of the 1960s and 1970s, it has arguably reached its apotheosis with the publication of sensationally popular microhistories like those by Heather Ann Thompson, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Lepore herself.

Some of the earliest microhistories looked at famous battles or at the lives of people who, although sometimes marginal, still had the means and education to keep detailed diaries. Yet in the last couple decades there has been pushback at these focuses. The fact remains that it is more difficult to write a microhistory centered on the lives of marginalized people. For much of American history, those who were not straight, white, literate, property-owning, and male often did not generate sufficient records to enable modern historians to capture their lives on paper in any significant detail. To counteract this reality and to write about those at "the bottom" took doggedness and no small amount of luck; there had to be moments when less powerful people interacted with more powerful people, those who kept the records. As Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson, chair of Iceland's Center for Microhistorical Research, noted: "Nearly all cases which microhistorians deal with have one thing in common; they all caught the attention of the authorities, thus establishing their archival existence."⁴

Over the last decade or two, several historians have done this pathbreaking work in microhistory, giving us compelling stories of women, poor people, queer people, and nonwhite people and using these...