Jill Lepore on Microhistory
Proposition 1: If biography is largely founded on a belief in the singularity and significance of an individual’s contribution to history, microhistory is founded upon almost the opposite assumption: however singular a person’s life may be, the value of examining it lies in how it serves as an allegory for the culture as a whole.
Proposition 2: Biographers seek to profile an individual and recapitulate a life story, but microhistorians, tracing their elusive characters through slender records, tend to address themselves to solving small mysteries about a person’s life as a means to exploring the culture.
Proposition 3: Biographers generally worry about becoming too intimate with their subjects and later betraying them; microhistorians, typically denied any such intimacy, tend to betray people who have left abundant records in order to resurrect those who did not.
Proposition 4: A biographer’s alter ego is usually the subject of the biography, while a microhistorian’s alter ego maybe a figure who investigates or judges the subject. For this reason, a microhistorian may be a charter in his own book.
… AND
Microhistory will always draw the writer’s and the reader’s attention away from the subject and toward the culture.
-Jill Lepore, “Historians who love too much: Reflections on microhistory and biography,” The Journal of American History 88:1 (June 2001), 141.
