Microhistory is a genre of history that focuses on small units of research, such as an event, community, individual or a settlement. According to Charles Joyner microhistory differs from case studies in that microhistory aspires to "[ask] large questions in small places". It is closely associated with social and cultural history.
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👉 Microhistory in the context of Alltagsgeschichte
Alltagsgeschichte (German; lit. 'history of the everyday' and sometimes translated as 'history of everyday life') is a form of social history that emerged among West German historians in the 1980s. It was founded by Alf Lüdtke (1943–2019) and Hans Medick (born 1939). Alltagsgeschichte can be considered part of the wider Marxian historical school of 'history from below'. It challenged the well-known framework of Strukturgeschichte ('history of structures'), within the German historical field and advocated for a new model of social history. It is related to microhistory.
In this Dossier
Microhistory in the context of History of mentalities
The history of mentalities, from the French term histoire des mentalités (lit. 'history of attitudes'), is an approach to cultural history which aims to describe and analyze the ways in which historical people thought about, interacted with, and classified the world around them, as opposed to the history of particular events or of economic trends. The history of mentalities has been used as a historical tool by several historians and scholars from various schools of history. Notably, the historians of the Annales School helped to develop the history of mentalities and construct a methodology from which to operate. In establishing this methodology, they sought to limit their analysis to a particular place and a particular time. This approach lends itself to the intensive study that characterizes microhistory, another field which adopted the history of mentalities as a tool of historical analysis.
Microhistory in the context of Historical anthropology
Historical anthropology is a historiographical movement which applies methodologies and objectives from social and cultural anthropology to the study of historical societies. Like most such movements, it is understood in different ways by different scholars, and to some may be synonymous with the history of mentalities, cultural history, ethnohistory, microhistory, history from below or Alltagsgeschichte. Anthropologists whose work has been particularly inspirational to historical anthropology include Emile Durkheim, Heinrich Schurtz, Arnold van Gennep, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, Clifford Geertz, Jack Goody, and Victor Turner.
Peter Burke has contrasted historical anthropology with social history, finding that historical anthropology tends to focus on qualitative rather than quantitative data, smaller communities, and symbolic aspects of culture. Thus it reflects a turn in 1960s Marxist historiography away from 'the orthodox Marxist approach to human behaviour in which actors are seen as motivated in the first instance by economics, and only secondarily by culture or ideology', in the work of historians such as E. P. Thompson.