What is Microhistory?
What is Microhistory?

Author: Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-29

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1135047073

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This unique and detailed analysis provides the first accessible and comprehensive introduction to the origins, development, methodology of microhistory – one of the most significant innovations in historical scholarship to have emerged in the last few decades. The introduction guides the reader through the best-known example of microstoria, The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, and explains the benefits of studying an event, place or person in microscopic detail. In Part I, István M. Szijártó examines the historiography of microhistory in the Italian, French, Germanic and the Anglo-Saxon traditions, shedding light on the roots of microhistory and asking where it is headed. In Part II, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon uses a carefully selected case study to show the important difference between the disciplines of macro- and microhistory and to offer practical instructions for those historians wishing to undertake micro-level analysis. These parts are tied together by a Postscript in which the status of microhistory within contemporary historiography is examined and its possibilities for the future evaluated. What is Microhistory? surveys the significant characteristics shared by large groups of microhistorians, and how these have now established an acknowledged place within any general discussion of the theory and methodology of history as an academic discipline.

The Cheese and the Worms
The Cheese and the Worms

Author: Carlo Ginzburg

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1421409887

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"Offers a study of culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. This book illustrates the confusing political and religious conditions of the time"--Publisher marketing.

The History of Everyday Life
The History of Everyday Life

Author: Alf Ludtke

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-11-20

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1400821649

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Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, emerged during the 1980s as the most interesting new field among West German historians and, more recently, their East German colleagues. Partly in reaction to the modernization theory pervading West German social history in the 1970s, practitioners of alltagsgeschichte stressed the complexities of popular experience, paying particular attention, for instance, to the relationship of the German working class to Nazism. Now the first English translation of a key volume of essays (Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen) presents this approach and shows how it cuts across the boundaries of established disciplines. The result is a work of great methodological, theoretical, and historiographical significance as well as a substantive contribution to German studies. Introduced by Alf Lüdtke, the volume includes two empirical essays, one by Lutz Niethammer on life courses of East Germans after 1945 and one by Lüdtke on modes of accepting fascism among German workers. The remaining five essays are theoretical: Hans Medick writes on ethnological ways of knowledge as a challenge to social history; Peter Schöttler, on mentalities, ideologies, and discourses and alltagsgeschichte; Dorothee Wierling, on gender relations and alltagsgeschichte; Wolfgang Kaschuba, on popular culture and workers' culture as symbolic orders; and Harald Dehne on the challenge alltagsgeschichte posed for Marxist-Leninist historiography in East Germany.

A Poisoned Past
A Poisoned Past

Author: Steven Bednarski

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2014-04-29

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1442604778

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This is the story of Margarida de Portu, a medieval French woman accused of poisoning her husband to death. Through the depositions and accusations made in court, the reader learns not only about Margarida herself, but also about medieval women, female agency, kin networks, solidarity, sex, sickness, medicine, and law. Unlike most histories, this compelling book does not remove the author from the analysis. Rather, it lays bare the working method of the historian, helping the reader learn how historians "do" history and discover the rewards and pitfalls of working with primary sources. The book opens with a chapter on microhistory as a genre, explaining its strengths, weaknesses, and inherent risks. It then tells the narrative of Margarida's criminal trial, including chapters on the civil suits, appeal, and Margarida's eventual fate. A map of late medieval Manosque is provided, as well as an example of a court notary's rough copy, a notarial act, a sample folio of a criminal inquest record. A timeline of Margarida?s life, list of characters, and two family trees provide useful information on key people in the story.

Microhistories of the Holocaust
Microhistories of the Holocaust

Author: Claire Zalc

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1785333674

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How does scale affect our understanding of the Holocaust? In the vastness of its implementation and the sheer amount of death and suffering it produced, the genocide of Europe’s Jews presents special challenges for historians, who have responded with work ranging in scope from the world-historical to the intimate. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a willingness to study the Holocaust at scales as focused as a single neighborhood, family, or perpetrator. This volume brings together an international cast of scholars to reflect on the ongoing microhistorical turn in Holocaust studies, assessing its historiographical pitfalls as well as the distinctive opportunities it affords researchers.

A Companion to Western Historical Thought
A Companion to Western Historical Thought

Author: Lloyd Kramer

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 0585470936

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This broad survey introduces readers to the major themes, figures,traditions and theories in Western historical thought, tracing itsevolution from biblical times to the present. Surveys the evolution of historical thought in the WesternWorld from biblical times to the present day. Provides students with the background to contemporaryhistorical debates and approaches. Serves as a useful reference for researchers andteachers. Includes chapters by 24 leading historians.

Filming History from Below
Filming History from Below

Author: Efrén Cuevas

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-01-11

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 0231551576

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Traditional historical documentaries strive to project a sense of objectivity, producing a top-down view of history that focuses on public events and personalities. In recent decades, in line with historiographical trends advocating “history from below,” a different type of historical documentary has emerged, focusing on tightly circumscribed subjects, personal archives, and first-person perspectives. Efrén Cuevas categorizes these films as “microhistorical documentaries” and examines how they push cinema’s capacity as a producer of historical knowledge in new directions. Cuevas pinpoints the key features of these documentaries, identifying their parallels with written microhistory: a reduced scale of observation, a central role given to human agency, a conjectural approach to the use of archival sources, and a reliance on narrative structures. Microhistorical documentaries also use tools specific to film to underscore the affective dimension of historical narratives, often incorporating autobiographical and essayistic perspectives, and highlighting the role of the protagonists’ personal memories in the reconstruction of the past. These films generally draw from family archives, with an emphasis on snapshots and home movies. Filming History from Below examines works including Péter Forgács’s films dealing with the Holocaust such as The Maelstrom and Free Fall; documentaries about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Rithy Panh’s work on the Cambodian genocide; films about the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War such as A Family Gathering and History and Memory; and Jonas Mekas’s chronicle of migration in his diary film Lost, Lost, Lost.

Minor Knowledge and Microhistory
Minor Knowledge and Microhistory

Author: Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1317607821

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This book studies everyday writing practices among ordinary people in a poor rural society in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Using the abundance of handwritten material produced, disseminated and consumed some centuries after the advent of print as its research material, the book's focus is on its day-to-day usage and on "minor knowledge," i.e., text matter originating and rooted primarily in the everyday life of the peasantry. The focus is on the history of education and communication in a global perspective. Rather than engaging in comparing different countries or regions, the authors seek to view and study early modern and modern manuscript culture as a transnational (or transregional) practice, giving agency to its ordinary participants and attention to hitherto overlooked source material. Through a microhistorical lens, the authors examine the strength of this aspect of popular culture and try to show it in a wider perspective, as well as asking questions about the importance of this development for the continuity of the literary tradition. The book is an attempt to explain “the nature of the literary culture” in general – how new ideas were transported from one person to another, from community to community, and between regions; essentially, the role of minor knowledge in the development of modern men.

Historiography in the Twentieth Century
Historiography in the Twentieth Century

Author: Georg G. Iggers

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0819573795

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“No one looking for a well-informed introduction to . . the key views of history adopted by professional historians . . could find a better one than this.” ―Richard J. Evans, author of In Defence of History A broad perspective on historical thought and writing, with a new epilogue. In this book, now published in ten languages, a preeminent intellectual historian examines the profound changes in ideas about the nature of history and historiography. Georg G. Iggers traces the basic assumptions upon which historical research and writing have been based, and describes how the newly emerging social sciences transformed historiography following World War II. The discipline’s greatest challenge may have come in the last two decades, when postmodern ideas forced a reevaluation of the relationship of historians to their subject and questioned the very possibility of objective history. Iggers sees the contemporary discipline as a hybrid, moving away from a classical, macrohistorical approach toward microhistory, cultural history, and the history of everyday life. The new epilogue, by the author, examines the movement away from postmodernism towards new social science approaches that give greater attention to cultural factors and to the problems of globalization. “The book has all the virtues one associates with Georg Iggers—lucidity, detachment, balance, and the ability to reveal the relation between trends in historical writing and their political and cultural contexts.” —Peter Burke, Cambridge University

Theoretical Discussions of Biography
Theoretical Discussions of Biography

Author: Hans Renders

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2014-04-17

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 9004274707

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Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing offers comprehensive overviews by 14 academic scholars of the actual state of the field of Biography Studies. In the volume, edited by biography scholars Hans Renders and Binne de Haan, specifically the connections between biography and the fields of microhistory, journalism, and Life Writing illuminate key challenges and problems in studying individual lives. Different perspectives are provided on the ways in which biography contributes to scholarship in the humanities in general and academic historiography in particular. The contributing authors are academic experts in these fields and include Richard D. Brown, Carlo Ginzburg, Nigel Hamilton, Marlene Kadar, Giovanni Levi, Sabina Loriga, Matti Peltonen, and James Walter.