MHI-03: HISTORIOGRAPHY
Course Code: MHI-03
Assignment Code: MHI-03/AST/TMA/2016-17
Total Marks: 100
Q. 4. What do you understand by
‘microhistory’? Describe the historians and their works related to this
tradition of history-writing.
Ans. Microhistory is the intensive
historical investigation of a well-defined smaller unit of research, most often
a single event, and the community of a village, a family or a person. In its
ambition, however, micro history can be distinguished from a simple case study
as micro history aspires to “search for answers to large questions in small places”
(in the words of Charles Joyner). Microhistory thus, has links with local
history and oral history. It resembles local history as its subject-matter is often
confined to a community or a locality. The oral sources, folk tales and legends,
are also used extensively by the microhistorians. The original idea of writing
microhistory came from Italy in the 1970s. Microstoria had a social history and
a cultural history wing. Carlo Ginzburg, a famous historian associated with
microhistory, traces the first use of the
term to an American scholar, George
R. Stewart. In his book, Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Charge at
Gettysburg, July 3, 1863 (1959), Stewart has used the term. In 1968, Luis
Gonzalez used the term ‘microhistory’ in the subtitle of his book which deals
with the changes experienced over four centuries by a small village in Mexico.
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