Frail Frontiers

Bibliographic Data

ID4960740
AuthorsGiovanni Levi (0000-0002-7041-6787, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume242
IssueSupplement_14
Pages37-49
Publication date2019-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePast & Present (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pastj/gtz037
OpenAlexW4252071013
LanguageEN
Citations received21

The terms 'microhistory' and 'global history' have been the source of a deal of muddle: 'micro' and 'global', which originally indicated clear-cut historiographic domains, soon became umbrellas under which many different procedures took refuge.Their original intention was not, in fact, to talk exclusively, in the first case, about small things and in the second about broad areas, the first only about local history and the second about the history of spatially distant events.This simplistic view has obscured much of the innovatory momentum which they initially produced.To start talking now about global microhistory runs the risk of creating further misunderstanding; risks, in fact, appearing to promote a marriage between different people who do not know each other that well and have different objectives, even if enjoying a degree of consanguinity.Which is why I would like to put forward a few suggestions aimed at clarifying aims, affinities and divergencies.Both microhistory and global history emerged at the height of the crisis, even trauma, of the end of a bipolar world order, and significantly expressed two distinct choices of field: microhistory, which came into being on the threshold of the 1980s, bounced in a confrontational manner off a historiographical, and more generally off a social sciences mindset which followed the rather rigid and mechanical models of a relatively stable world governed by an equilibrium between two superpowers, proposing a reading of the past and of the present, alert to the first significant signs of political, social, even cultural crisis that was becoming ever more apparent.It was the product, then, of a widespread feeling that had not yet fully taken hold of the social sciences, and still less of academic historical practice.What it promoted was a reducedscale focus on the innards of historical phenomena, reading through a microscope to identify significant details not immediately evident on the surface, in order to find out how, by looking closely at specific cases, events, places, objects and individuals, one could come up with general questions that might nonetheless have different and not necessarily generalizable answers: history therefore as a science of general questions and their resulting specific answers, not generated mechanically but varying according to the usages, institutions, actions and personal interpretations of individual human

Biographical and Historical Analysis · Computer Science · History · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

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