Microhistory: What It Is, and What It's Good For (5th and Final)

In this fifth and final post, I want to say a few things about the future of microhistory. If recent discussions of theory and methodology, and just the production of historiography itself are any indication, then it seems that microhistory has a promising future. For example, a recent unigram search of Google Books indicates an exponential growth in the occurrence of microhistory from the 1980s up to the present. Kim Tolley’s new microhistory, cited at the beginning of the first post, is one of many.

Positive signs also turn up in one of my own subfields of study, the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement. The authors of a recently-published survey textbook, The Stone-Campbell Movement: A Global History, make the following generalization:

A shift away from macro-history began in the 1970s, especially rejecting history written from the standpoint of dominant institutions or socio-political elites. Instead, the focus was on “micro-histories” and the stories of outsiders and marginalized groups, especially immigrants, racial minorities, and women.[1]

Among the few works of Stone-Campbell history that fit this generalization, at least two stand out: Daisy L. Machado’s Of Borders and Margins: Hispanic Disciples in Texas, 1888-1945, and Edward J. Robinson’s To Save My Race from Abuse: The Life of Samuel Robert Cassius.[2]

To summarize this entire series then, microhistory grew out of the interests of European social historians and was developed in Italy beginning in the 1970s. Its initial concern was to use “microscopic” methods to verify, correct, and supplement macrohistory, whose generalizations might be misguided or incomplete. In this way, microhistory could serve the goal of the Annales school to present “total history.” Since its inception, some examples of microhistory have been criticized for their dependence on the methods of cultural anthropology, or for their indulgence in anecdotalism and antiquarianism. Nevertheless, works described by their authors as microhistories, as well as other works that exhibit some of the characteristics of the microhistorical method, have grown in popularity among historians. At least one advocate of microhistory, namely, American historian Richard D. Brown, does not consider this trend a scholarly fad. Rather, he sees it as important to the foundation of history itself.

Of course, Brown’s overall concern relates to much more than the usefulness of microhistory. For example, in a much more general way French social historian Arlette Farge has responded to the question of the relationship between truth and historiography. She takes a mediating approach, one that argues that while no historian ever produces “the definitive truthful narrative,” no historian worthy of the name can ever disregard truth, or fail to care about what is true.[3]

Here, there is a discernible correspondence between Farge’s position and that of Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis. In his series of lectures titled The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Gaddis observes that historians have always known that arriving at historical consciousness means one has learned “that there is no ‘correct’ interpretation of the past” and that “the act of interpreting is itself a vicarious enlargement of experience.”[4] At the same time, Gaddis rejects the extreme conclusion that because “we have no absolute basis for measuring time and space” we therefore “can’t know anything about what happened within them.”[5]

Both Farge and Gaddis would agree, it seems, that historians can and should identify many things that are true, while at the same time recognizing that one’s interpretation of a set of facts is just that: an interpretation.

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[1] D. Newell Williams, Douglas A. Foster, and Paul M. Blowers, eds., The Stone-Campbell Movement: A Global History (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2013), 5.

[2] Daisy L. Machado, Of Borders and Margins: Hispanic Disciples in Texas, 1888-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Edward J. Robinson, To Save My Race from Abuse: The Life of Samuel Robert Cassius (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007).

[3] Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 95-96.

[4] John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 10.

[5] Ibid., 34.

A Glimpse of What Historians Actually Do

Farge, Arlette. The Allure of the Archives. Translated by Thomas Scott-Railton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

First published in French in 1989, this book is now available to English readers thanks to what appears to be a very fine translation by Thomas Scott-Railton. As the "Forward" by Natalie Zemon Davis explains, author Arlette Farge is a social historian who has focused on eighteenth-century France. But this book of hers is not another historical monograph. It is, instead, a book about the experience, value, and proper uses of archival research. In other words, in The Allure of the Archives, Farge does not practice her craft so much as she elegantly describes and reflects on it.

The author's approach is to toggle back and forth between descriptive, analytical chapters and brief, autobiographical sections--which tend to reveal how petty and annoying some people in the archives can be, and how one easily distinguishes between veterans and rookies. Along the way, Farge puts in a good word for the necessary task of transcribing old, handwritten documents. Though tedious, she insists that there is something essential and rewarding about such work (15-17).

In a section titled "Her Presence," she notes that if traditional histories often omit women, the archives never do: "In every popular expression of emotion, in groups large and small, women were on the scene and dove in headfirst into the action" (39).

Farge is convinced that the prime way of getting at social history is to focus on conflict: "Why not choose to take a deliberately provocative position on this, and assert that society's character manifests itself through antagonisms and conflicts? It is more important to say this than ever, because today there is a tendency to doubt the centrality of conflict" (43).

In another memorable section, the author describes how it is that some manuscripts are much easier to decipher when they are read out loud: "Nothing looks like anything, unless it is articulated, and the tongue delivers the writing from incomprehensibility" (60). Yet, people in reading rooms are supposed to work silently.

Farge also notes several pitfalls associated with archival research. For example, "you can become absorbed by the archives to the point that you no longer know how to interrogate them" (70). She observes that another common trap is to identify a thesis too early, thereby ensuring that you will "find" exactly and only what you were looking for in the first place.

Nearing the end, the author raises and responds to the question of the relationship between truth and written history. She takes a mediating approach, one that says that, while no historian every produces "the definitive truthful narrative," no historian worthy of the name can ever disregard truth, or fail to care about what is true (95-96). 

Here, I noticed a correspondence between Farge's book and one by Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis titled, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford, 2002). Gaddis notes that, on the one hand, historians have always known that arriving at historical consciousness means you have learned "that there is no 'correct' interpretation of the past" and that "the act of interpreting is itself a vicarious enlargement of experience" (10). On the other hand, he rejects the extreme conclusion that because "we have no absolute basis for measuring time and space" we therefore "can't know anything about what happened within them" (34). Both Farge and Gaddis would agree, I think, that historians can and should identify many things that are true, while at the same time recognizing that one's interpretation of a set of facts is just that, an interpretation.

John Lewis Gaddis on the Nature of History

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

What do historians do? How do they conceive of and go about their work? And what's the value of it? In this series of eight lectures, originally delivered at Oxford during the 2000-01 school year, John Lewis Gaddis responds to these and other basic questions. A native of Texas, Gaddis made his reputation by writing landmark books about the Cold War. He is currently the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University.

To make his discussion of theory easier to follow, he constantly uses illustrations, analogies, and quotations. He borrows these mainly from the worlds of art, literature, and popular culture. Even the book’s cover art, Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, sets up the first of many metaphors that Gaddis puts to work in order to communicate what he wants to say.

Throughout the book, Gaddis also interacts with two illustrious predecessors who raised similar questions: Marc Bloch, who wrote The Historians Craft, and E. H. Carr, author of What Is History? He also brings in the observations of other historians—most notably William H. McNeill, R. G. Collingwood, and Thomas Babington Macaulay—and, significantly, one evolutionary biologist, the late Stephen Jay Gould.

The references to Gould the scientist are significant because they underscore one of Gaddis’s most fundamental conclusions: historians should at least try to attain, like scientists, “a consensus of rational opinion over the widest possible field” (38). Conversely, biology’s acceptance of punctuated equilibrium (as opposed to the old expectation that the fossil record should be uniform), and a general scientific awareness of change and development (as opposed to old notions of timelessness in a static universe), mean that scientists have become increasingly historical. The comparison of the two disciplines comes out most clearly in Chapter Three where the author makes the case that the processes by which historians develop, study and test their theses is comparable to methods used in the “hard” sciences.

But, notes Gaddis, to say that history should in some respects be like science, and that science has become more historical, is not to say that history belongs in the classification of “social science.” For unlike social scientists, Gaddis rejects the assumption that historians should be able to isolate an independent variable, which can then be used both to identify a historical cause and to forecast the future. The complexity of reality, historical or otherwise, simply won’t allow for the identification of independent variables. In fact, reality is full of interdependent variables. In a world like that, also full of processes, “so much depends on so much else” (55).

So, then, what is the proper work of historians? Gaddis answers that they “interpret the past for the purposes of the present with a view to managing the future” (10). But no sooner does he give that straightforward answer than he adds a caveat. The real trick is to do this “without suspending the capacity to assess the particular circumstances in which one might have to act, or the relevance of past actions to them” (11). In other words, to employ the “lessons of history” requires us to do other things, like perceiving how the present is like the past and how it’s different.

Even before that, though, historians have to do the work of making a map, a favorite metaphor of Gaddis’s. That is to say, historians must represent the past in a way that both corresponds to the terrain of historical reality and that proves useful to people who might want to actually use the map. This business of map-making, he notes, leads the historian to feel both masterful (he’s the one, after all, who exercises power by simply describing) and insignificant (the terrain he describes is vast and ancient and will long outlive him, etc.).

In addition to the question of history as a social science, Gaddis also deals with the advent of postmodern thought and the questions that it puts to historical research and presentation. Here we see him both embracing and rejecting postmodernism. On the one hand, he notes that historians have always known that arriving at historical consciousness means you’ve learned “that there is no ‘correct’ interpretation of the past” and that “the act of interpreting is itself a vicarious enlargement of experience” (10). On the other hand, he rejects the extreme conclusion that because “we have no absolute basis for measuring time and space” we therefore “can’t know anything about what happened within them” (34).

So what were some of my impressions of the book? I might say that I could have done without so many specific references to Oxford and Great Britain. A lot of them didn't register with me. I also found myself rolling my eyes at some of the wisecracks, often a little sappy or overdone. I sometimes detected slight errors. For example, a light year is not a measurement of time, but of distance (27). A sentence on page 55 should end with “form an ecological view of reality,” not “from . . . .”

But to say things like that would be quibbling. The fact is, Gaddis has produced a short, brilliant introduction to some of the most important questions that historians can ask themselves regarding what they do and what it means. And he’s done it with a good bit of flair and success.