QCQ #1
“Hence, proposition 2: Traditional biographers seek to profile an individual and recapitulate a life story, but microhistorians, tracing their elusive subjects through slender records, tend to address themselves to solving small mysteries, in the process of which a microhistorian may recapitulate the subject’s entire life story, though that is not his primary purpose”.
I just thought this was a very interesting and provocative way to view microhistory as a practice. I personally had never heard of microhistory and was very surprised that I hadn’t because I feel like the basis of it is very common in historical analysis. In my opinion microhistory is just as important as biography because it essentially is just a more detailed, less broad version. I think that teaching microhistory would be a very interesting class because the skill can be used in many ways. Instead of researching the entire journey of someone’s life, we can instead pick notable parts and really dig to get accurate and precise information, which sometimes a broad biography lacks. It also has loose constraints which is also interesting, for example you could do a microhistory of someone’s entire life if you choose to do so, it just being very labor intensive. This proposition also ties into learning more of a person’s culture while untangling the detailed “small mysteries”, which I think is usually not mentioned as much in broad biographies. I think overall microhistorians are needed and that this type of analysis could be used more effectively by the general public of academics and historians. My question is: What do you think the world would be like if microhistory was discovered/ invented a couple hundred years earlier? How would our historical literature be different?
QCQ #2
“The biography-loving public does not want to hear that biography is a flawed genre.”21 Whether it annoys their readers or not, microhistorians, too, like to discuss the rights and wrongs of burglary while jimmying locks. But they are equally likely to pretend they were never in the house in the first place or, if they were, that they had a badge and a search warrant”.
I thought this quote was very interesting and true to many practices today. Many public groups are not shy to assert this type of hypocrisy and get away with it. This is a great comparison of microhistory and biography because it’s a very real one, and can be seen very often in not just these practices. Many enjoyers of a certain topic would easily turn a blind eye to any negativity and jump to shielding what they enjoy instead. This is easy, but in the end will usually end up causing more harm than good due these flaws being evident but not analyzed. When a group of people enjoy something it’s easy to look at it with rose colored glasses and ignore any issues with whatever it may be. However, because we are human nothing is bound to be perfect; therefore this logic is flawed yet very common in my opinion. Also very common and said above is the way that historians are likely to try and cover it up afterwards, which shows some similarity between microhistory and biography. My question would be: Regarding the general public, what causes this compulsion to defend a subject so blindly that you become unaware of its issues, and why do biography and microhistory both share this?
