What is Microhistory?

What is Microhistory? PDF

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.

Microhistories

Microhistories PDF

Author: Barry Reay

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-11-07

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9780521892223

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This 1996 book uses a local study to explore some of the more significant societal changes of the modern western world.

Microhistories of the Holocaust

Microhistories of the Holocaust PDF

Author: Claire Zalc

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 336

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.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal PDF

Author: Mary Roach

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2014-04

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0393348741

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The irresistible, ever-curious, and always bestselling Roach returns with a new adventure to the invisible realm that people carry around inside.

Minor Knowledge and Microhistory

Minor Knowledge and Microhistory PDF

Author: Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1317607813

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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.

Microhistories of Composition

Microhistories of Composition PDF

Author: Bruce Mccomiskey

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1607324059

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Writing studies has been dominated throughout its history by grand narratives of the discipline, but in this volume Bruce McComiskey begins to explore microhistory as a way to understand, enrich, and complicate how the field relates to its past. Microhistory investigates the dialectical interaction of social history and cultural history, enabling historians to examine uncommon sites, objects, and agents of historical significance overlooked by social history and restricted to local effects by cultural history. This approach to historical scholarship is ideally suited for exploring the complexities of a discipline like composition. Through an introduction and eleven chapters, McComiskey and his contributors—including major figures in the historical research of writing studies, such as Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Kelly Ritter, and Neal Lerner—develop focused narratives of particular significant moments or themes in disciplinary history. They introduce microhistorical methodologies and illustrate their application and value for composition historians, contributing to the complexity and adding momentum to the emerging trend within writing studies toward a richer reading of the field’s past and future. Scholars and historians of both composition and rhetoric will appreciate the fresh perspectives on institutional and disciplinary histories and larger issues of rhetorical agency and engagement enacted in writing classrooms that are found in Microhistories of Composition. Other contributors include Cheryl E. Ball, Suzanne Bordelon, Jacob Craig, Matt Davis, Douglas Eyman, Brian Gogan, David Gold, Christine Martorana, Bruce McComiskey, Josh Mehler, Annie S. Mendenhall, Kendra Mitchell, Antony N. Ricks, David Stock, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Bret Zawilski, and James T. Zebroski.

How Welfare Worked in the Early United States

How Welfare Worked in the Early United States PDF

Author: Gabriel J. Loiacono

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-04-15

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0197515452

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What was American welfare like in George Washington's day? It was expensive, extensive, and run by local governments. Known as "poor relief," it included what we would now call welfare and social work. Unlike other aspects of government, poor relief remained consistent in structure between the establishment of the British colonies in the 1600s and the New Deal of the 1930s. In this book, Gabriel J. Loiacono follows the lives of five people in Rhode Island between the Revolutionary War and 1850: a long-serving overseer of the poor, a Continental Army veteran who was repeatedly banished from town, a nurse who was paid by the government to care for the poor, an unwed mother who cared for the elderly, and a paralyzed young man who attempted to become a Christian missionary from inside of a poorhouse. Of Native, African, and English descent, these five Rhode Islanders utilized poor relief in various ways. Tracing their involvement with these programs, Loiacono explains the importance of welfare through the first few generations of United States history. In Washington's day, poor relief was both generous and controlling. Two centuries ago, Americans paid for--and many relied on--an astonishing governmental system that provided food, housing, and medical care to those in need. This poor relief system also shaped American households and dictated where Americans could live and work. Recent generations have assumed that welfare is a new development in the United States. This book shows how old welfare is in the United States of America through five little-known, but compelling, life stories.

Microhistories of Technology

Microhistories of Technology PDF

Author: Mikael Hård

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-02-20

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 3031228138

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In this open access book, Mikael Hård tells a story of how people around the world challenged the production techniques and products brought by globalization. Retaining their autonomy and freedom, creative individuals selectively adopted or rejected modern gadgets, tools, and machines. In standard historical narratives, globalization is portrayed as an unstoppable force that flattens all obstacles in its path. Modern technology is also seen as inexorable: in the nineteenth century, steamships, telegraph lines, and Gatling guns are said to have paved the way for colonialism and other forms of dominating people and societies. Later, shipping containers and computer networks purportedly pulled the planet deeper into a maelstrom of capitalism. Hård discusses instances that push back against these narratives. For example, in Soviet times, inhabitants of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, preferred to remain in—and expand—their own mud-brick houses rather than move into prefabricated, concrete residential buildings. Similarly, nineteenth-century Sumatran carpenters ignored the saws brought to them by missionaries—and chose to chop down trees with their arch-bladed adzes. And people in colonial India successfully competed with capitalist-run Caribbean sugar plantations, continuing to produce their own muscovado and sell it to local consumers. This book invites readers to view the history of technology and material culture through the lens of diversity. Based on research funded by the European Research Council and conducted in the Global South, Microhistories of Technology: Making the World shows that the spread of modern technologies did not erase artisanal production methods and traditional tools.

Microhistories of Memory

Microhistories of Memory PDF

Author: Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 1805393987

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The West German novel, radio play, and television series, Through the Night (Am grünen Strand der Spree, 1955-1960), which depicts the mass shootings of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union during World War II, has been gradually regaining popularity in recent years. Originally circulated in post-war West Germany, the cultural memories of the holocaust embedded within this multi-medium construction present different forms of historical conceptualization. Using numerous archival sources, Microhistories of Memory brings forward three comprehensive case studies on the impact, actors, and materiality of accounts surrounding questions of circulation of cultural memory, audience reception, production, and popularity of Through the Night in its different mediums since its first appearance.

Microhistories of Communication Studies

Microhistories of Communication Studies PDF

Author: Pat J. Gehrke

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-19

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1317247191

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The story of an academic discipline is usually conveyed in grand movements and long spans, but it can also be told through the lives of individual scholars, through the development of specialties, through the creation and change of departments, and through the formation and transformation of organizations. Using twelve histories of micro-dimensions of communication studies, this volume shows how sometimes small decisions, single scholars, individual departments, and marginalized voices can have dramatic roles in the history and future of an academic discipline. As a compilation of micro-histories with macro-lessons this volume stands alone in communication studies. Read as a companion to A Century of Communication Studies, the National Communication Association’s centennial volume, it offers rich detail, missing links, and local narratives that fully flesh out the discipline. In either case, no education in communication studies is complete without an understanding of the themes, challenges, and triumphs embodied by the twelve micro-histories offered in this book. This book was originally published as two special issues of Review of Communication.