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The Singularization of History : Social History and Microhistory within the Postmodern State of Knowledge
Abstract
This article established its theoretical framework by criticizing the way in which social historians have practiced their scholarship in the last two decades and how and why they have not respondent to the challenges of "the cultural turn" and postmodernism. The main focus of this essay is on the rise in interest in microhistory across the globe in the last decade and on the topics of recent microhistorical research. The essay pays particular attention to one element common to the theoretical orientations of all microhistorians, viz. the connections between micro and macro. Microhistorians of all persuasions emphasize the importance of placing small units of research within larger contexts. In this article, the author seeks to refute this principle and show its inherent contradictoriness. The article explores the implications of this move for the epistemological grounding of microhistory. The author encourages historians to cut the umbilical cord that ties them to grand historical narratives, but he is aware that this is not an easy task, as the grand narratives inform the conventional codes of scientific research.
As an alternative to accepting the guidance of grand narratives, the author advances an approach that he proposes to call the "singularization of history". Taking this approach involves scrutinizing the details and nuances of the events and objects of research and looking for meaning within them, rather than in larger contexts. The article severely critiques the conventional theoretical framework of microhistorical research and attempts to redefine the aims and parameters of microhistory in order for it to achieve its full potential. The "singularization of history" shows the way.
... The results of the survey and field studies in small areas are presented in a broader context of sustainable socioeconomic development investigated in the societal, economic, environmental, and cultural domains. The analysis of sources is founded on the so-called 'singularization of history', which is an alternative to grand historical narratives [44]. This approach involves analysing details and nuances related to events and studying objects and looking for their specific significance in and of themselves rather than in broader contexts. ...
... domains. The analysis of sources is founded on the so-called 'singularization of history', which is an alternative to grand historical narratives [44]. This approach involves analysing details and nuances related to events and studying objects and looking for their specific significance in and of themselves rather than in broader contexts. ...
... Not only does SAGA present sources, it also tells stories. It follows the historiographic approach known as microhistory: recording small communities, their customs, relationships, problems, and individual experiences in order to save their ephemeral substance from oblivion [44]. Another example of online effort is The Online Encyclopaedia of Ciążkowice presented as a compendium of knowledge about the town and municipality (https://ciezkowice.pl/pl/312/0/encyklopedia-ciezkowic.html, ...
Cultural heritage consolidates regional cultural identity, expands social capital, and stimulates local communities. These functions make it an important component of sustainable socioeconomic development. The objective of the article is to identify vanishing components of cultural heritage in Małopolskie Voivodeship and propose ways to use them to enhance regional development and promote rural cultural heritage. Moreover, the article aims at identifying such components of cultural heritage that could be included and presented more extensively in future strategic documents despite being disregarded or only superficially acknowledged to date. The research involved a representative sample of the adult residents of rural areas in Małopolskie Voivodeship, Poland (n = 400) using the computer-aided telephone interviewing method (CATI). The research shows that the awareness of the people in Małopolskie Voivodeship is dominated by the ‘classical’ perception of cultural heritage components. The respondents confirmed that traditional professions were still practiced in the voivodeship, and that artisan products were available. The most common of these were beekeeping, sculpture, carpentry, lacemaking and embroidery, smithery, pottery, plaiting, weaving, and musical instrument production. According to the respondents, the most frequent components of vanishing cultural heritage were shrines on trees, old barns (69%), wells (55%) and old root cellars (40%). The respondents most often mentioned farmers’ wives’ associations as independent social and professional organizations in rural areas that promote food traditions. A survey, literature review, and study of strategic documents demonstrated that digital cultural heritage was absent in the responses and strategic documents, even though it is found in rural Małopolskie Voivodeship as rustic cyberfolklore, for example. It is a research gap worth investigating.
... As stated, a micro-historical approach allows for a creative inductive engagement beyond abstract generalities that, in the end, only accept those pieces of information that accommodate certain theories and discards those that do not confirm (Thompson, 1981). Microhistory is, above all, a question of analytical scale (Magnússon, 2003), which leads to thick descriptions of particular case studies departing from a specific historical question that inform general historical trends from the point of view of complexity, avoiding determinism and biased outcomes (Ginzburg, 1994;Grendi, 1994;Ribeiro, 2019). This is what Bob Jessop, taking a materialist relational point of view, named the "contingent necessity," that is, the consideration of the impossibility of determining an outcome due to the multiplicity of causal chains and its combination in particular conjunctures (Jessop, 2007, pp. ...
... In this sense, it is quite similar to the idea of "singularization" proposed by Sigurdur Gylfi Magnússon and Charles Orser(Magnússon, 2003;Orser, 2016). ...
Following the proposal for the special issue, the aim of this study is to reflect on the potentialities and setbacks of a micro-historical approach to the archaeological record. This will be done by analysing the local organization of Early Modern husbandry in a territory in northwestern Iberia, where investigations have been carried out since 2017. I will apply the theoretical background of microhistory to four specific archaeological sites to delve into the social structuring and power relationships among the different agents involved in stockbreeding in the territory. In this regard, I will argue that one of the most compelling contributions of microhistory is to delve into the deep connection between the systemic and the quotidian, between structure and agency. However, this connection is not always straightforward and visible in the sources, and thus a deep theoretical and methodological background becomes necessary to understand questions such as how power was conceived and articulated at the local level and in daily life.
... Ribeiro, 2019;Riva & Grau Mira, 2022) is to be set within this scholarly panorama and is more than welcome. Microhistory was initially proposed by Italian social historians (Grendi, 1977;Ginzburg, 1990;Levi, 1991) and represents a sound way of inductive reasoning based on the conjectural or evidential paradigm (Brooks, DeCorse, & Walton, 2008;Brewer, 2010;Davis, 1983;Magnússon, 2003;Revel, 1995). As for the field of archaeology, there has been a paucity of methodologically grounded proposals explicitly drawing on Microhistory, especially by North American historical archaeologists tackling heavily text-based topics (e.g. ...
... Microhistory encapsulates such an appeal as it involves: (1) a reduction of the scale of observation; (2) a more inclusive approach, attentive to divergences from the norm; and (3) an emphasis on narration as a suitable historical strategy. For the last decades, some social historians have called for a reinvigoration of exemplary narratives drawing on detailed analyses at a smaller scale (Davis, 1983;Magnússon, 2003;Revel, 1995). Microhistory emerged in the late 1970s in Italy as a reaction against the macroscopic and quantitative mainstream led by the Annales school. ...
This contribution delves into the ways of archaeological reasoning based on material remains, tackled as minute physical traces or signs capable of shedding light on underlying and otherwise unapproach-able past phenomena. This is indeed the basis of Microhistory or the conjectural paradigm in History. This article identifies key characteristics regarding this way of inductive or "bottom-up" inference and demonstrates its prospects when applied to prehistoric contexts. To illustrate this point, the article draws on a case study from the protohistory of Iberia: The treasure of Aliseda (seventh-sixth centuries BCE). This one-off assemblage-a true anomaly in its time, past, and present-was accidentally found in 1920 and has thence-forth been subject to assorted interpretations-mainly as individual burial goods from a feminine tomb-using deductive reasoning constrained by strong prejudices. A recent and comprehensive revision of this issue from an inductive and multi-stranded approach-mobilising several independent lines of evidence-has led to a fresh, sounder, and finer-grained micro-narrative. This case exemplifies a successful microhistorical enquiry, which has tracked retrospectively an array of inadvertent observations-from legacy dataset, new fieldwork, and science-based analyses-to illuminate the deviant circumstances framing this occurrence.
... Some authors have considered microhistory a scale of analysis, the cultural biography of things, places or landscapes, the study of households, daily lifestyles, osteobiographies and even the professional biographies of archaeologists (Beaudry, 2015;Borić, 2007;Díaz-Andreu & Portillo, 2021;Hosek, 2019;Magnússon, 2003;Pauketat, 2001). ...
This is an introduction to the Special Issue on Microhistory and Archaeology.
... Second, it brings the individual into discussion as an actor in a wide global narrative, the narrative that is usually told in historical archaeology when it conceptualises aspects such as globalisation, giving people individual perspectives. This singularisation of behaviours (Magnússon, 2003) allows archaeologists to deal with human agents in such a way that their feelings and emotions can be observed in the archaeological record. Third, it permits us to discuss how these women found different forms of resisting and/or manipulating the system, singular stories that could have been the stories of many other women whose names archaeologists rarely discover but whose objects, the ego-artefacts they called their own, they can find and discuss. ...
Microhistory is a part of historical research that focuses on the behaviours, practices, and perceptions of individuals and small communities, locating them in social, economic, and cultural frameworks. Although archaeology has already focused on similar attempts, microarchaeology seldom takes a female perspective. This article aims to discuss how microhistory can be used in historical archaeology, engendering past narratives, those which are usually so difficult to find from historical documents and archaeological sites, and introducing the concept of the ego-artefact, the artefacts we know to have belonged to specific people and which are almost biographical. By doing this analysis, we are individually reconstructing past narratives while including these stories in macronarratives.
... 94-95). Orser's article is a response to a provocation by Magnússon (2003), that those proclaiming to undertake microhistorical research are too beholden to the metanarrative, which works against the grain of an approach which is intended to reveal specificity and difference. Elements of this argument are apparent in the development of household archaeology, too. ...
It is proposed that combining a microhistorical approach with the frameworks offered by household archaeology and posthumanism provides a way of rethinking what urbanity means in archaeological (specifically later medieval) contexts. This approach is deployed to challenge generalising approaches which obscure the complexity, vibrancy, and generative capacity of past urbanities. Focussing on the question of the fortunes of later medieval small towns in England, a posthuman household microhistory of two households in the town of Steyning (southern England) is presented. This demonstrates how a focus on the practices undertaken by, and relational constitution of, households can reveal difference and open new avenues for understanding past urbanity.
... Druhá, Magnússonova část knihy je navíc ukázkou poměrně výstředního metodologického konceptu, který zatím nezískal výraznější počet stoupenců, ale především není ani teoreticky dobře propracovaný, a to navzdory skutečnosti, že jej autor představil již v roce 2003. 3 Kniha tak jen potvrzuje zjevný fakt, že pod hlavičkou mikrohistorie je v současnosti praktikováno hned několik různých teoretických konceptů, což koneckonců není pro soudobou historiografii nic neobvyklého. Podobně je na tom třeba historická antropologie 4 nebo gender historie. ...
... Two examples are the work of Alison Light (Light 2015) and Maria Stepanova (Stepanova 2021), neither of whom is a genealogist. The research approaches family historians use may be influenced by microhistory exemplified in some of the work of Carlo Ginzburg (Ginzburg 1980) and Natalie Davis (Davis 1983), or the theoretical work of microhistorians (Grendi 1977;Levi 2001;Ginzburg 1989;Ginzburg 2012;Magnússon 2003;Magnússon and Szijártó 2013;Peltonen 2001;Szijártó 2002;Cerutti 2004), or books by historians like David Sabean (1998) and Barbara Hanawalt (1986). Yet other family historians undertake projects such as reading cemetery inscriptions, inventorying cemetery and church locations, and indexing local and regional records held at various government and private archives. ...
Family genealogy is well-positioned to explore the significance of burial and death, particularly as it relates to one’s connection to ancestors. Doing genealogical research involves visiting the land of the dead, treasuring information, heirlooms, and documents providing evidence about the life of an ancestor, and often revealing a presence of and interaction with the ancestor. Burial is not only associated with the essence of humanity, and coeval with historical consciousness, but it is also essentially connected with genealogy. One may argue that historical consciousness is founded on awareness of and practices bearing on genealogical and ancestral relations. After briefly listing points related to burial and mortuary practices, the article discusses Western philosophers beginning with Plato to show the dual emphases of concern for personal mortality and death of the other. It focuses on death of the other as being able to explain funerary practices and as amenable to genealogy. Next, a brief examination of Freud’s uncanny and of Abraham and Torok’s transgenerational psychology constructed on evidence of the unconscious phantom lead to the spectral turn instituted by Derrida. The article is rounded out with a consideration of the metatextuality of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey epics. Both involve a visit by the living to the land of the dead. Both are textual, placing unwritten stress on the critical role of writing.
... In this perspective, big history emerges from 'all' micro-history interactions. Microhistory studies (theory, , 193-214, exemplified by Ginzburg 1980, Magnússon 2003, 709-716, Trivellato 2011) focus on single historical units/events to ask-as defined by Charles Joyner-'large questions in small places' in contrast with large-scale structural views (Joyner 1999, 1). ...
... 19. Magnússon udatert;Magnússon 2003;Magnússon & Szijárto 2013;Smith-Solbakken & Weihe 2020. Konsekvensen er at ansatte som står i en underordnet posisjon, til tross for retorikk om medvirkning og likhet, fremdeles opplever meningsundertrykkelse. ...
Kielland-ulykken, eller katastrofen, i 1980 er den største industrielle ulykken vi har hatt i Norge. Kantringen av plattformen er også den største maritime ulykken som har vært i Norge etter krigen og den som utløste den største internasjonale redningsaksjonen vi har hatt i Nordsjøen. Totalt døde det 123 menn i ulykken, 89 overlevde. Av de omkomne ble 30 aldri funnet. Ulykken avslørte mangelfullt redningsutstyr, manglende tilgjengelighet på sikkerhetsutstyr, svikt i beredskapen og mangelfull sikkerhetsopplæring. Men den viste også betydningen av god trening, vurderingsevne og profesjonalitet både blant redningsmannskapet og de som var om bord på Kielland. I artikkelen diskuterer vi betydningen av egeninnsatsen og samarbeidet mellom de som var om bord på Kielland og naboplattformen Edda. Det var en innsats der samarbeid var avgjørende viktig for at mange overlevde, men som også førte til at noen omkom under forsøk på å redde andre. Vi beskriver redningsaksjonen med utgangspunkt i erfaringer fra dem som var med på ulykken. Vi utdyper egeninnsatsen og samarbeidet, og analyserer mekanismene bak denne samhandlingen ut fra tenking rundt solidaritet og samhold. Informantene og perspektivet er fra de som overlevde ulykken, de som var med på redningsaksjonen og de som var vitner til den fra luften og fra skipene.
Egeninnsatsen var avgjørende for at den redningskapasiteten som kom til med helikopter og skip hadde noen å redde. Det var helt avgjørende med samholdet og samarbeidet mellom de som havnet i ulykken. Den solidariteten som var mellom arbeiderne, var kraften i arbeiderfellesskapet og gjorde at 89 overlevde mot alle odds.
... So far, the approaches of historians in this area has been defined broadly under the term 'social history'-a field that has been most sensitive to ethnicity, gender, education, labour and family. Despite moving away from a study of 'social structures' from the 1980s (Lloyd, 1991), the discipline has struggled with the methodological task of writing histories 'from the bottom up' or for and by the social subjects of enquiry (Magnusson, 2003). Instead, there has been a call away from metanarratives, towards a consideration of 'singular' cultural reference points, and the need to separate historical 'traces' from their representation by the historian as 'historical knowledge' (Munslow, 1997). ...
This chapter addresses the question of how historical knowledge can help one to make sense of communities like Rotherham. It first considers what counts as ‘historical knowledge’, and examines the limitations of historiography in producing histories at a local level, where issues of class, gender, and ethnicity are played out in people's everyday lives. The chapter then explores how historians are expanding what counts for historical knowledge — in particular, the co-production of research, which can be defined as research with people rather than on people. It also provides some real-world examples of co-production in action. Finally, the chapter provides some arguments as to why historical knowledge matters.
... We scoured the primary source data from the archives, primarily the business and personal correspondence between Walker and her lawyer, and were better equipped to interpret this data armed with secondary sources which include the biography by Bundles (2001) and peer-reviewed articles related to social and activist entrepreneurship, with some of those articles incorporating stories and information about Madame C.J. Walker. Our focused scrutiny of Madame Walker's case may extend beyond the parameters of microhistory and our closereading method may verge on what Magnússon (2003) identifies as a "singularization of history" approach. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, this paper seeks to formalize a definition of activist entrepreneurship and differentiate it from social entrepreneurship. Second, this paper proposes a model that explains how the storytelling process, in the form of the message and means of communication, influences the activist identity process and consequently the legitimacy of the activist entrepreneur.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper explains the historical method and offers an overview of the unique case of Madam C.J. Walker and analyzes how she gained legitimacy as an activist entrepreneur by conveying psychological capital (Psycap) concepts in her message and political skill in the means of her communication. The paper also analyzed books being written on her and also letters that were exchanged between herself and her lawyer F.B. Ransom.
Findings
The authors have found out that Madam Walker used Psycap elements such as self-efficacy, hope, resiliency and optimism as message and elements of political skill such as social astuteness, interpersonal skill, networking ability and apparent sincerity as means to communicate the message toward her followers and built a legitimate social identity where she had won the trust of them.
Research limitations/implications
The primary limitation of this paper is that it is theoretical in nature and uses only one case study to support the theoretical model. However, when analyzing complex relationships, historical cases offer a wealth of insight to solve the problem at hand.
Originality/value
By using the elements of the model discussed in the research paper properly, people could create a legitimate identity for themselves where any message they give to their employees, colleagues and sub-ordinates would be viewed as a selfless one and that would increase the chances of their messages or orders being accepted and obeyed by the followers.
... Writers of microhistory, like Robyn and Helena, depart from a particular historical case, proceeding to identify the social and/or cultural meaning of this case in light of its historical context (Holton 2011). Sigurður Gylfi Magnusson (2003) suggests that microhistory is "more likely to reveal the complicated function of individual relationships within each and every social setting and they stress its difference from larger norms"a fact that is undoubtedly confirmed by Scharf 's life story. ...
... He saw historical merit in addressing the "typical", given its repetitive nature; however, microhistorians would inescapably fail in their overly technical attempt to apprehend singularity. Braudel's position was countered by Magnússon (2003), who asserted that it would be "the singularity -the unit itself -that has by far the greatest epistemological value of all the possibilities available" (p.721). Magnússon characterizes the "singularization of history" as consisting of "avoiding the metanarratives which direct the course of research and, instead, giving research the freedom to find its own course within the subject material with the support of the ideology of microhistory" (p.723). ...
The late flourishing of environmental history has been accompanied by attempts to combine it with a microhistorical approach, improving our understanding of specific events of the past as well as pointing to relevant historical insights at the macro level, which might inform policy-driven contemporary debates on environmental issues. Therefore, this article attempts to shed light on the epistemology and historiography of microhistory, stressing its basis on the indiciary paradigm as avowed by the Italian microhistorian Carlo Ginzburg, its emphasis on context, relations and connections, and its potential for unveiling new information at the macro level. It is asserted that these features make the microhistorical approach an adequate methodological tool to environmental history, anticipating a fruitful future for environmental microhistory.
... Writers of microhistory, like Robyn and Helena, depart from a particular historical case, proceeding to identify the social and/or cultural meaning of this case in light of its historical context (Holton 2011). Sigurður Gylfi Magnusson (2003) suggests that microhistory is "more likely to reveal the complicated function of individual relationships within each and every social setting and they stress its difference from larger norms"a fact that is undoubtedly confirmed by Scharf 's life story. ...
... Second, we position elements of microhistory for its potential line of inquiry that aligns with historical organization studies and critical management historiography, specifically in our attempt to link facets of microhistory practice with ANTi-History. From our point of view, microhistory shares the following points of intersection worth noting: (i) the intensive historical study, on a micro-level scale, is similar to ANTi-History's preference of 'following the actors' that develops a sense of how knowledge of the past are produced through a course of performances and relational activities; (ii) Magnússon's (2003) 'singularization of history' suggests each localized, contextualized study of people and events tell us more than (macro) generalizable analysis. ANTi-History is sympathetic to this approach yet goes further insomuch as it 'follows actors' (human, non-human, and non-corporeal) to study sociopolitical influences at the micro-level. ...
This paper focuses on the impact of warfare, gender, and memory on the development of Imperial Airways (British Airways’ predecessor airline). Through a ‘close reading’ of archival materials and published histories, we examine how wartime experience prior, during, and following World War I came to shape the development of gendered organizational processes and practices in the airline’s emergent organizational culture from 1924–1939. Gender is theorized from a feminist poststructuralist position serving to problematize singular notions of power. Analysis of culture is explored through an ANTi-History and microhistorical approach revealing how history is produced and constitutes the ‘sense’ of organization. We examine how references to warfare are introduced into the narratives of Imperial Airways and its predecessor airlines, how warfare is utilized in the airline’s historical accounts, and how this influences our understanding of gender over time. Findings suggest two key aspects of memory at play. Memory of warfare is more embedded in cultural practices (e.g. piloting as male only) and symbolism (e.g. military-style pilots’ uniforms) than in extant narratives of the time. However, despite the Women’s Royal Air Force in 1918 and exploits of pre-war female flyers, women’s role in warfare was largely forgotten at all levels of the airline.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to present ANTi-microhistory of social innovation in education within Robert Owen’s communal experiment at New Harmony, Indiana. The authors zoom out in the historical context of social innovation before zooming into the New Harmony case.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors used ANTi-microhistory approach to unpack the controversy around social innovation using the five-step procedure recently proposed by Mills et al. (2022), a version of the five-step procedure originally proposed by Tureta et al. (2021).
Findings
The authors found that the educational leaders of the New Harmony community preceded proponents of innovation, such as Drucker (1957) and Fairweather (1967), who viewed education as a form of social innovation.
Originality/value
The authors contribute to the history of social innovation in education by exploring the New Harmony community’s education society to uncover the enactment of sustainable social innovation and the origin story of humanistic management education.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to revisit the potential of the New Deal as a research context in management and organization studies and, in doing so, forward the role one of its chief architects, Harry Hopkins, played in managing the economic crisis. The exploration takes us to multiple layers that work together to form context around Hopkins including the Great Depression, the Roosevelt Administration, and ultimately, the New Deal. By raising Harry Hopkins as an exemplar of historical-narrative exclusion, the authors can advance the understanding of his role in the New Deal and how his actions produced early insights about management (e.g. modern crisis management).
Design/methodology/approach
The paper experiments with the methodological assemblage of ANTi-History and microhistorical analysis that the authors call “ANTi-Microhistory” to examine the life narrative of Harry Hopkins, his early association with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and later, the New Deal. To accomplish this, the authors undertake a programme of archival research (e.g. the digital repository of The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum) and assess various materials (e.g. speeches, biographies and memoirs) from across multiple spaces.
Findings
The findings suggest Harry Hopkins to be a much more powerful actor in mobilizing New Deal policies and their effect on early management thought than what was previously accepted. In the process, the authors found that because of durable associations with Roosevelt, key policy architects of the same ilk as Harry Hopkins (e.g. Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, Lewis Douglas, and others) and their contributions have been marginalized. This finding illustrates the significant potential of little-known historical figures and how they might shed new insight on the development of the field and management practice.
Originality/value
The aim is to demonstrate the potential of engaging historical research in management with the individual – Harry Hopkins – as a unit of analysis. By engaging historical research on the individual – be it well-known or obscure figures of the past – the authors are considering how they contribute to the understanding of phenomena (e.g. New Deal, Progressivism or Keynesian economics). The authors build on research that brings to focus forgotten people, communities and ideas in management studies but go further in advocating for space in the research to consider the scholarly potential of the individual.
Specialists in the study of gender and sexuality in early modern northern art are clarifying—and resolving—problems of evidence and method to transform the field. This essay assesses contributions that bear on visual culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, primarily in the Netherlands, with attention to gender, intersectionality, queering, and trans theory. Of particular importance is the concept of “female agency,” which assesses the exercise and limits of women’s power under patriarchy. I break from convention by proposing a more flexible and inclusive model, termed “situational agency,” which allows for greater variety and change in human experience and for variability in gender and power. Importantly, it resolves problems of context and periodization that have limited our understanding of early modern northern art.
O presente artigo busca caracterizar os principais procedimentos da abordagem da Micro-História, e apontar as contribuições que ela pode trazer para a consolidação da pesquisa da História do Design no Brasil. Para isso, realizamos uma descrição geral de aspectos epistemológicos e metodológicos dessa abordagem, e a seguir discorremos sobre algumas das principais características da história e do campo do design que influenciam a sua pesquisa e como a adoção da Micro-História pode auxiliar essa consolidação e tornar a História do Design no Brasil mais ampla e democrática. Para ilustrar nossa argumentação, relacionamos algumas pesquisas concluídas que exemplificam situações em que o micro-olhar sobre um objeto de estudo contribuiu para o resultado final e a ampliação do conhecimento sobre o design.
The Ilford Carnival was a procession of costumed individuals and decorated vehicles held annually in this then outerlying London suburb between 1905 and 1914 to raise funds for establishing a local hospital. This thesis utilises the carnival to provide an insight into how different suburban organisations and social groups came together in a particular performance of community. It argues that the carnival’s administrative body, a nd other organisations involved, provided opportunities for inclusion and social capital attainment.
It also demonstrates how a local culture of voluntary action provided the basis of a largescale charitable initiative with an ethos of communal self-help. The suburban setting demonstrates the continued relevance of carnival, originating in the premodern ritual year, within a modern urban environment. In the wake of Ilford’s drastic expansion, the carnival’s annual recurrence provided reassuring familiarity , and an opportunity for inversionary performances, with the carnival’s philanthropic rationale providing a justification for what might have otherwise been seen as transgressive.
The thesis illustrates that the procession functioned as a suburban public sphere. Performances throughout operated between poles of artifice and sincerity, with dominant ideals about national and imperial identity, or class and gender roles, being projected through acts of dressing up, while such ideals were both transgressed and upheld through practices like crossdressing and blackface.
The suburb too was reimagined, as both rural idyll and metropolitan tourist attraction. It also highlights how the carnival’s timing, structure and content were impinged upon and influenced by exp anding cultural industries, with the carnival commodified by participating businesses and media, but also appropriating fundraising models and imagery from commercialised formats like sport and theatre, connoting the topicality and recognisability that ena bled it to compete within the metropolitan market for people’s spare time and money.
Microhistory can serve two functions in historical translation/translator studies. One is to discover the forgotten individual translators or to address the previously neglected issues concerning translations, translators, translational events, translation institutions, etc. And the other is to provide the translation/translator studies scholar with the means to take a fresh look at previously investigated topics. The two functions can be fulfilled through conducting a microscopic investigation of a topic and in light of discovering the overlooked primary sources as well as critical re-reading of the previously used sources. The purpose of this article is to propose a practical step-by-step method for microhistorical translation/translator research in the Iranian context. The article first briefly introduces microhistory. Because archives and primary sources are of great importance in microhistorical research, different types of sources are introduced afterwards. The paper then provides an overview of some of the existing microhistorical studies in the field of translation studies. After that, primary sources for a microhistorical translation/translator research are introduced and finally, a tentative method is proposed.
After reviewing recent genealogists’ writings that genealogy is a kind of microhistory, the article lists six characteristics of microhistory and argues that genealogy is not microhistory though the two share a focus on small scale groups or people. However, genealogy may learn from microhistory’s use of clues in reading texts. What is revealed by studying clues is a form of indirect evidence. A comparison of the Freudian unconscious and its relevance to genealogy helps draw out the usefulness of clues in family history research. The article wraps up with a brief overview of traces in genealogical research.
This paper focuses on contemporary retail history, analysing trends in ground floor retail occupancy within King Street, Manchester, UK, from 1967 onwards, through an analysis of Goad shopping centre plan data over this period. The paper also considers the development of recent narratives relating to occupancy and vacancy within this street via documentary analysis of local media coverage. Over the period in question, analysis of occupancy of individual premises reveals a contrasting pattern of continuity and flux, with varying degrees of retail vacancy and the mix of retailers over the period changing from a heterogenous mix to one where fashion retailers predominate. The paper concludes by addressing the utility of a microhistorical approach in terms of explaining the developments in King Street over this period.
The focus of this article is two small Norwegian rural societies and the adaption to a creative economy at the crossroads of innovation, sustainability, and survival, during centralization, generational change in a welfare state. One of the communities, Etnedal, is an inland mountainous municipality. The other, Solund, is a coastal fishing, fish-farming, and farming municipality. The two municipalities are from point of population among the smallest in Norway. The author discusses, the importance of the identity attached to the traditions of sustainability. The data is published statistical and historical information, as well as oral information and the interaction from two art projects in the communities. Both are ongoing artistic interaction and documentation. The discourse of the article is from the point of critical realism.
In March 1980, the oil-platform Alexander L. Kielland capsized in the North Sea resulting in the death of 123 workers. The Norwegian inquiry into the disaster was closed to the public and the survivors' accounts of the disaster differed considerably from the official account. The inquiry was experienced as undemocratic by those who had been in the disaster. Many of them felt humiliated, claiming that their opinions were not given due weight. We argue that if the inquiry had been more transparent and inclusive, important information would have been made available that might have prevented subsequent disasters. Such transparency would be supported if disaster commissions used a critical realist version of knowledge acquisition based on a layered ontology and grounded in an epistemology that uses retroduction and judgemental rationality. In this article, critical realism is also used to justify the interdisciplinary nature of the research, which starts with historical methods.
Understanding Disability Throughout History explores seldom-heard voices from the past by studying the hidden lives of disabled people before the concept of disability existed culturally, socially and administratively.
The book focuses on Iceland from the Age of Settlement, traditionally considered to have taken place from 874 to 930, until the 1936 Law on Social Security (Lög um almannatryggingar), which is the first time that disabled people were referenced in Iceland as a legal or administrative category. Data sources analysed in the project represent a broad range of materials that are not often featured in the study of disability, such as bone collections, medieval literature and census data from the early modern era, archaeological remains, historical archives, folktales and legends, personal narratives and museum displays. The ten chapters include contributions from multidisciplinary team of experts working in the fields of Disability Studies, History, Archaeology, Medieval Icelandic Literature, Folklore and Ethnology, Anthropology, Museum Studies, and Archival Sciences, along with a collection of post-doctoral and graduate students.
The volume will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, history, medieval studies, ethnology, folklore, and archaeology.
Il processo di marginalizzazione della storia è stato avvertito in Italia in seguito alle dinamiche che negli ultimi anni hanno interessato il mondo accademico e le univer-sità, dinamiche che rischiano addirittura di mettere in forse la riproduzione di nuove generazioni di storici e con esse la trasmissione di tale sapere. Tuttavia questo processo è iniziato molto tempo fa nel quadro della generale crisi dei saperi umani-stici e il contesto in cui si concretizza è velocemente mutato con la rilevanza assunta dai processi di globalizzazione e il deflagrare della crisi sistemica che ha colpito il mondo dal 2008. Per affrontare le criticità di oggi, non sono sufficienti soluzioni formali che rendano la storia solamente più 'gradevole' e alla moda. Dobbiamo comprendere i perché e i modi di tale crisi e marginalizzazione, riflettendo sulla relazione tra qualitativo e quantitativo e tra micro e macro, sulla capacità di fare generalizzazioni, sui problemi spaziali e sui rapporti tra economia, come disciplina, e storia economica. Tuttavia, dato che tali problematiche non possono essere risolte solo sul piano tecnico e sono centrali per immaginare l'utilità sociale del nostro 'mestiere di storico', sempre sullo sfondo rimane la questione del senso di fare storia e, più in generale, della produzione di senso che riparta dalla centralità degli esseri umani. Per questo, intervenendo nel dibattito in corso, abbiamo pensato che la via giusta da percorrere non fosse quella di cercare di individuare una strategia, una soluzione o un modo di fare storia, e storia economica, unici, né di creare una gerarchia di rilevanze. La consapevolezza di fondo è che per affrontare lo studio di società complesse e rispondere a domande complesse, siano utili e necessari punti di vista e risposte plurali e dialoganti.
As an alternative to the conventional translation/translator history, which is primarily product-oriented, microhistory gives translation studies scholars the means to distance themselves from translated texts. It also presents an opportunity to uncover previously unseen facts, to bring to light marginalised and forgotten translators and to take a fresh look at major historical narratives of the past. This article first discusses the inherent flaws in the conventional and social histories of translation and highlights the significance of microhistory in filling the gaps in our historical knowledge. It then introduces an archival method for conducting a microhistorical translator research. Finally, the application of the method is demonstrated in a study concerning an unvoiced female translator of early 20th century Iran.
This article is the microhistory of a family from Madeira who moved to Angola, from the time they settled in the highlands of the Huila in the late nineteenth century to the decolonization process in 1975. With the use of testimonies, archival research and bibliographic research, this is a history-memory of the lived experience of a particular family. Its purpose is to achieve an understanding of the wider social, political and historical structures that marked the history of Portuguese colonization and decolonization. Focusing on a Portuguese family of nineteenth-century settlers’ descendants, people of the small business and working class, we give these outliers their place in the history of white settlers and problematize class, gender, and race relations in colonial society.
This essay collection features innovative scholarship on women artists and patrons in the Netherlands 1500-1700. Covering painting, printmaking, and patronage, authors highlight the contributions of women art makers in the Netherlands, showing that women were prominent as creators in their own time and deserve to be recognized as such today.
Yair Mintzker's book on Jew Süss raises a series of provocative questions about German history and history itself, which this forum aims to address. Specifically, it presents four reflections on Mintzker's book that cover the following range of topics: Jay Howard Geller situates Mintzker's work within the historiography on Jewish biographies and antisemitic trials; Sarah Maza explores whether Mintzker pursues the venerable task of getting to the “truth” of who Joseph Oppeinhemer was, despite his claims to the contrary; Jesse Spohnholz considers Mintzker's book as a model of microhistory; and my essay takes a broader approach by confronting the central issue of self-interest in history.
We draw upon a ‘small history’ of one family to throw light on lived experience of welfare in the past, and consider how it may provide some glimpses into what Britain’s current economy of welfare trajectory could mean, where the state welfare safety net has holes and an ad hoc charitable safety net is being constructed beneath them. Using archived case notes from the Charity Organisation Society across the interwar period to the comprehensive welfare state, we discuss one family’s negotiation of poverty and the fragmented economy of welfare involving nascent state provision and a safety net of myriad charitable bodies, and the need to be judged as respectable and worthy. While lived experience of inequalities of assessment criteria, provision and distribution provide some indication for the potential trajectory of contemporary welfare in Britain, towards fragmented localised settlements, the small history also reveals a muted story of alternatives and reliability.
When the American Protestant Mission in Syria entered the educational arena of nineteenth-century Tripoli, its administrators founded long-lasting educational institutions primarily for the purpose of converting souls to Protestant Christianity. Secondarily, missionaries sought to impose ideas of gender and class on their students. Through previously unexamined memoirs, school records, and missionary writings, this article offers a microhistorical analysis of the Tripoli Girls' School (est. 1873) and the Tripoli Boys' Boarding School (est. 1904). This study begins by situating the schools within the broader context of an increasingly peripheralized and predominantly Sunni Muslim city, showing that the geographical, social, and educational environment of Tripoli shaped and was shaped by the boarding schools. It explores two trends within the Tripoli schools, namely, the ‘professionalization’ of female students, and the reification of class divisions, as Tripoli was integrated into a system of global capitalism. Finally, it moves beyond narratives of ‘secularization’ and argues that students played a significant role in shifting the emphasis of missionary education away from religious conversion to an educational model of interreligious cooperation that saw Muslims and Christians as partners in a syncretic endeavour.
Microhistory of 21 Australian Red Cross Bluebird nurses who served with the French Army during WW1.
This article scrutinizes stories produced, distributed, and circulated outside the literary field to reexamine the nature of literature as sets of cultural activities in specific periods and locations. It argues that these texts which poetically and aesthetically resemble literary artifacts yet do not perform in the cultural matrix as such actually prove that literary materials and tools are “leaking” through the permeable cultural borders of the literary field to other cultural and social fields, serving various purposes and objectives. Exploring two examples — a fiction describing the unthinkable nuclear future and a microhistory reconstructing an elusive past — the article suggests that fictions which have been constructed outside the literary realm (by historians, political scientists, physicists, and others) are useful methodologies when standard disciplinary research procedures and methods are inadequate or irrelevant. In these circumstances imaginative stories enable researchers and other cultural figures to construct and transfer new knowledge efficiently. This crossover of devices and poetic structures from the literary field into other cultural arenas implies the significant cultural role played by literature even when its social function seems to be declining.
Our critical examination of James Meredith’s leadership during the racial integration of higher education in the early 1960s reveals an important, missing companion to social endorsement in the leadership construction process: social contestation. Through the lens of moral conviction theory and using a combined ANTi-History/Microhistorical method, we analyzed over 250 letters written to James Meredith by opponents undergoing a process of social identification leading to collective hate and opposition of Meredith’s defiance to racial norms. Their shared moral conviction that what Meredith was doing was ‘evil’ worked in conjunction with the collective social endorsement of supporters to cement Meredith as a polemic leader of the racial integration movement and affect his leadership style. Therefore, leadership construction processes triggered by actors in defiance are underscored by both shared social endorsement and contestation.
This article seeks to map out possibilities for conducting a microhistorical study of the socio‐political and cultural roles that uncertainty, as a consequence of a lack of verifiable knowledge, played in political debates over the nuclear threat in Britain in the Second Cold War. Focusing on this politics of the unknown in the period from 1979 to 1985 when Britain witnessed resurging fears of nuclear war, this exploratory essay sets out to make three main interventions: First, it conceptualizes “uncertainty” as a subjective social and cultural construct with fluid meanings that does not necessarily have to hold exclusively negative connotations but might offer opportunities for historical actors. Second, this essay proposes an examination of the politics of the unknown about the anticipated effects of a nuclear war within a wider synchronic economy of non‐nuclear‐weapons‐related concerns such as de‐industrialization or unemployment. Finally, the article introduces the periodization of “Britain's long nuclear 1980s” to allow for a consideration of relevant diachronic aspects of this politics of the unknown, thereby adding further depth to the microhistory. Throughout, this exploratory study draws on historical examples to illustrate its key theoretical points.
Стаття присвячена аналізу та систематизованому узагальненню сукупності наукових фактів, які об’єктивно характеризують різні сторони життя та діяльності тринадцятого Міністра шляхів сполучення Російської імперії Адольфа Яковича Гюббенета. При підготовці роботи було застосовано історичний, компаративний та біографічний методи, які дозволили систематизувати та критично оцінити використані джерела, порівняти оцінку результатів діяльності А.Я. Гюббенета різними авторами, виділити головне в сучасному стані вивчення теми та результатів інших дослідників, дати характеристику попередніх робіт з даного питання та чітко відокремити питання, котрі залишилися ще нерозв’язаними. Аналіз джерел дозволив дати об’єктивну оцінку внеску, який зробив А.Я. Гюббенет у проекти загальнодержавного значення присвячені підпорядкуванню залізничної справи контролю держави, врегулюванню залізничних тарифів, підпорядкуванню залізничних тарифів урядовому нагляду, визначенню стану під’їзних колій та багатьох інших. Показано, що як Міністр шляхів сполучення А.Я. Гюббенет відігравав важливу роль у діяльності Інституту Корпусу інженерів шляхів сполучення, створеного у Санкт-Петербурзі. Проаналізована багатовекторність діяльності А.Я. Гюббенета на посту Міністра шляхів сполучення Російської імперії. На основі порівняння оцінок, зроблених різними дослідниками, щодо прийнятих А.Я. Гюббенетом заходів стосовно покращення водних шляхів сполучення Російської імперії, показана його роль у вирішенні проблеми перебудови Маріїнської водної системи, як масштабного загальнодержавного проекту, що передбачав негайне обстеження усіх штучних водних шляхів держави з метою вирішення питання про їх подальше використання. Встановлено, що завдяки особистому внеску А.Я. Гюббенета, проект швидко знайшов підтримку та був схваленим у 1890 р. імператором Олександром ІІІ, завдяки чому була створена Особлива комісія, яка у 1890-1892 рр. досліджувала Вишнєволоцьку, Березінську, Огінську і Дніпровсько-Бузьку водні системи. Це дозволило накреслити низку заходів щодо кардинального покращення та швидкого розвитку водних шляхів сполучення Російської імперії. Використання біографічного методу дозволило розглянути постать тринадцятого Міністра шляхів сполучення Російської імперії Адольфа Яковича Гюббенета як окремої особистості, що дало змогу по новому оцінити його життєвий шлях.
In recent discussionsof the work of new historicist critics like Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose, it has oftenbeen remarked that the theory of history underlying their reading practice closely resembles thatof postmodern historiographers like Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit. Taking off from onesuch remark, the aim of the present article is twofold. First, I intend to provide a theoretical basisfrom which to substantiate the idea that new historicism can indeed be taken to be the literary-critical variant of what Frank Ankersmit has termed the “new historiography.” Inthe second half of the article, this theoretical foundation will serve as the starting point of afurther analysis of both the theory and practice of new historicism in terms of its distinctlypostmodern historiographical project. I will argue that in order to fully characterize the newhistoricist reading method, we do well to distinguish between two variants of postmodernhistoricism: a narrativist one (best represented in the work of Michel Foucault) and aheterological one (of which Michel de Certeau's writings serve as a supreme example). Abrief survey of the two methodological options associated with these variants (discursive versuspsychoanalytical) is followed by an analysis of the work of the central representative of newhistoricism, Stephen Greenblatt. While the significant use of historical anecdotes in his workleaves unresolved the question to which of either approaches Greenblatt belongs, the distinctiondoes serve a clear heuristic purpose. In both cases, it points to the dangerous spot where the newhistoricism threatens to fall prey to the evils of the traditional historicism against which it defineditself.
Debates among historiansshow that they expect descriptions of past people and events, interpretations of historicalsubjects, and genetic explanations of historical changes to be fair and not misleading. Sometimesunfair accounts of the past are the result of historians' bias, of their preferring one accountover others because it accords with their interests. It is useful to distinguish history that ismisleading by accident from that which is the result of personal bias; and to distinguish personalbias from cultural bias and general cultural relativity.
This article explains what fairdescriptions, interpretations, and explanations are like in order to clarify the senses in which theycan be biased. It then explains why bias is deplorable, and after noting those who regard it asmore or less inevitable, considers how personal bias can be avoided. It argues that it is notdetachment that is needed, but commitment to standards of rational inquiry.
Some mightthink that rational standards of inquiry will not be enough to avoid bias if the evidence availableto the historian is itself biased. In fact historians often allow for bias in evidence, and evenexplain it when reconstructing what happened in the past.
The article concludes bynoting that although personal bias can be largely avoided, cultural bias is not so easy to detect orcorrect.