Micro History

Micro history refers to the historical study of micro topics or a single unit of society. It has a close relationship with local history and oral history. Its subject matter is often confined to a locality. Moreover, its sources are local in origins and nature. Although it focuses on the locality and the ordinary people, it has nothing traditional about it. It is a late-modern reaction to the dissatisfaction from the macro-level histories. Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, microhistory focussed on the small units, individuals, and groups. The micro historians felt that the micro-level study is the only possible way to know the reality.

Carlo Ginzburg, one of the best-known historians gives the credit of the first use of the term ‘micro history’ to an American scholar, George R. Stewart. In his book, Pickett’s Charge: A Micro history of the Final Charge at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863, published in 1959, Stewart firstly used the term. The book is centred on an event that lasted for only about twenty minutes. In 1968, Luis Gonzalez used the term ‘micro history’ in the subtitle of his book which deals with the changes experienced over four centuries by a tiny, ‘forgotten’ village in Mexico. Giovanni Levi was the first Italian historian to extensively use this term.

As a possible historical practice, micro history emerged during the 1970s and the 1980s in Italy. Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi, Carlo Poni, Edoardo Grendi, and Gianna Pomata are some of the Italian historians who made the world-famous through their writings. Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976) represents the best example of this historical trend. 

Micro history is a late modern, sometimes, postmodern, response to the problems of modern historiography. The micro historians are critical of not only the Rankean model but also the macro-historical paradigms developed by Marxism, the Annales School, and even the old social history. Micro history was a path-breaking and radical response and it took the historiography away from its focus on the ‘big structures, large processes and huge comparisons’. Instead, it concentrated on the small units in society. It was severely critical of the large quantitative studies and macro-level discourses because they distorted the reality at a small level. It focused on the small units and on the lives of the individuals living within those units.