Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
I didn’t know it had a name until I wandered into a Barnes and Noble Bookstore in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. On a small table between the best sellers was an eclectic mix of a dozen books under the title, “Microhistory.”
I didn’t realize it was a genre, but I’ve used it since 1980 in teaching U.S. History at the high school and college level.
Microhistory, according to the experts, is a historical research method that studies small groups of people, seemingly unrelated events, and geo-historical connections to understand grander historical themes.
In this way, you can challenge the preconceived notions of major historical themes and get to the gritty details of life in the past, within the scope of larger events.
As a youth, my history classes were always centered on the “Great Men” idea. That’s a good way to begin, but I much prefer the writing of Rick Atkinson and his trilogy of World War II, “An Army at Dawn”, “The Day of Battle”, and “The Liberation.” He mentions Eisenhower, Patton, and Rommel, but he writes extensively of privates, sergeants, squad leaders, and boatswain mates as well, bringing their experiences to life.
I read his first volume of the Revolutionary War Trilogy in 2019, “The British Are Coming,” and have waited patiently for volume two, “The Fate of the Day” which will reach the store shelves in May.
It started for me with Dr. E.B. Long and his American Civil War Survey Class. Old E.B., was a historical genius, devoid of a history degree. In fact, he didn’t have an undergraduate degree at all. He quit Northwestern University during his junior year as a journalism major to join the U.S. Army in 1943 in Italy as a war correspondent.
He told me one day in his office, “No, I don’t have a BA, but I’ve got a dozen honorary doctorates from schools all over the country, that should be worth something.”
We read “Lee’s Lieutenants”, “A Stillness at Appomattox”, “Mr. Lincoln’s Army” and “Glory Road”, the Bruce Catton Trilogy of the Army of the Potomac in the Civil War, but we also read, “Johnny Reb and Billy Yank.”
That final book was my first exposure to “Microhistory.” It took the story of the individual soldier fighting for the Union and the Confederacy and brought their daily life, miseries, and triumphs to life within the wider stage of the war. I was hooked.
Later, in Dr. Robert Roripaugh’s Literature of the American West, and American Folklore classes I learned the power of historical fiction in painting a mental picture of life as it once was.
Microhistory just adds to the historian’s palette.
My students studied excerpts from “Plants that Changed the World”, “Black Elk Speaks”, the diaries of Lewis and Clark, along with reading the novels “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair and “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck. I would have delved into it more, but 50 minutes a day is barely enough, even with homework to cover the expanse of American History.
In the years since I’ve taught, I read five or six books a month. I discovered three outstanding authors, that until that morning at Barnes and Noble, I didn’t realize were in a genre all their own.
Mark Kurlanksy, Spike Carlsen, and Mary Roach all bring the infinitesimal to prominence. It started with Carlsen’s “Splintered a History of Wood.”
The history of wood, you might ask as you raise an eyebrow. Yes, as a carpenter and woodworker, the veneer of the subject (ugh…I know, bad pun) appealed to me. Carlsen went to great lengths in describing in exquisite detail man’s interaction with wood over the eons, and our continued reliance on it in the 21st century. Carlsen’s other books are equally intriguing as he conquers the history of salt, and cod.
Kurlansky takes it up a notch with a bewildering variety of subjects. He also wrote about salt and codfish, but also of cuisine in “The Core of an Onion,” and “The Food of a Younger Land,” where he mixes history with recipes in a delicious (I know, another bad pun) mix of historical and culinary knowledge.
“Birdseye, the Adventures of a Curious Man,” details the life, discoveries, and invention of frozen food, one of the mainstays of modern life through his tale of Oliver Birdseye, the founder of frozen foods.
“Paper”, “Salmon”, “The Big Oyster”, and “Milk” take the mundane things of everyday life and bring them into a clear historical focus, with the connections these simple things have on the path of human history.
When it comes to straight history, the year 1968 has always stood out to me as one of our nation’s seminal events. I tried a couple of times to sell it as a class to several universities but never got any traction.
Kurlansky details this year from the viewpoint of the common man as American life is ripped apart with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, race riots in American cities, and the senseless carnage of Vietnam. These events are all linked to bus drivers, teachers, mechanics, farmers, and factory workers and detail the impact they had on these historical dramas, and the effect they had on these individuals. Brilliant.
Mary Roach is one twisted gal, and I mean that in a positive, complimentary fashion. Her works would appeal to the eighth-grade mind if you could pry the cell phone out of their hands for a few seconds.
My first book by Roach was “Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.” Yep, she takes a dead subject (OK, last pun) and brings it to life with the story of how cadavers have aided science and medicine since the ancient world. Fraught with criminal details from eras when body snatching was a capital crime, to modern forensic pathologists, it is an excellent example of microhistory.
I’ve read several of her other works, including “Packing For Mars,” her foray into outer space. “Gulp,” a history of the alimentary canal, studying how the foods we’ve eaten over time affect us, and “Grunt, The Curious Science of Humans at War,” that details the physical, psychological, and emotional strain war has on the warrior and the bystander. Yes, all great stuff.
On the Microhistory table at Barnes and Noble that day was “Fuzz, When Nature Breaks the Law.” It is a tale of the interaction between humans, bacteria, protozoa, and animals, from mice and snakes to moose and grizzly bears. It’s on deck in my reading list.
These books are all examples of microhistory. But so is “Japanese Destroyer Captain,” “The Sky Beyond,” “Adolf Galland German Ace of Aces” “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains” by Isabella Bird, and hundreds perhaps thousands of other books I’ve read on specific battles, campaigns, settlers, Native Americans, aircraft, ships, crops and people in general.
There is nothing microscopic about microhistory. By studying the small, seemingly insignificant, we can get a grip on the larger, less tenable subjects and learn from them. All it takes is putting down the cell phone, placing the remote in the drawer, and taking the time to read and enjoy.