Microhistory: Small Things Make For Big Storytelling

Sometime around the year 1660, in the southern French town of Tarascon, Ruben de la Vialle and his friends entered a lavishly-decorated cave. Images of bison, ibex, stags, and “heavy jowled” horses were everywhere. Like generations of young men since, de la Vialle marked the occasion by writing his name on a wall—less than four feet from “a large, well-preserved, and extraordinarily striking depiction of bison and ibex painted in black.” Also like generations of young men since, there is no evidence that he—or his friends—thought much of the work already on display.

Known as the Niaux Cave, these paintings belong to the Magdalenian Period—they predate de la Vialle and his companions by several thousand years. But as David Lewis-Williams observes in his work on cave art, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art, this was no willful act of vandalism. Living two centuries before Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was first published, de la Vialle and his crew subscribed to the consensus view on human origins and the relatively young Earth. “[V]irtually everyone believed that human history started miraculously at a moment that was not very long ago.” Before people had an idea of their prehistory, they simply couldn’t see cave art for what it was: the community work of thousands of years of human activity.

We suffer from the same case of tunnel vision when studying big historical events. Sweeping “macro” histories tend to warp the reality of life on the individual level—projecting a more modern, omniscient “big picture” perspective on events lived moment-to-moment.  The microhistorian, by contrast, shrinks the field of view, focusing instead on “small units and how people conduct their lives within them.”* As a storytelling device, microhistories dramatize larger events in ways that are relatable, digestable, and blur what we think of as indelible race, ethnic, class, and gender boundaries.

My first interaction with microhistory came as a history undergrad at West Virginia University studying early American History. First, through the story of George Robert Twelves Hewes—a modest Boston shoemaker who participated in both the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party; then, incredulously, discovering that there was an exhaustive history of the color mauve (Simon Garfield’s Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World). A series of one-word microhistories was soon to follow (Rats, Salt, Cod).

As we’ll see in his history of the Johnstown flood, David McCullough uses a full complement of people and their work—railroad employees, telegraph operators, pastors, merchants, captains of industry—to chronicle the afternoon of May 31, 1889 in Pennsylvania's Conemaugh Valley. McCullough explained his approach in a 2012 interview with 60 Minutes. “The only way to teach history, to write history, to bring people into the magic of transforming yourself into other times, is through the vehicle of the story. It isn't just a chronology. It's about people. History is human.”

If the town meeting or the local referendum is the “laboratory of democracy,” then ordinary people are the vessels where great currents of thought and event, shared ideas and values, often collect. Anyone who’s ever exchanged bits of folklore with friends and neighbors understands the truth of this statement. These are the stories we tell amongst ourselves, about ourselves, and as close as the historian—and the casual reader—can get to life in our skin without feeling the heat from the blast furnace or the dog-days-of-summer chill of the coal mine.

*see Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson’s "What Is Microhistory?"