Microhistory

This is the introduction to a collection of essays edited under the title Global History and Microhistory, which was published as a supplement volume of Past & Present in November 2019.  The whole volume is available open access at the following link:
https://academic.oup.com/past/issue/242/Supplement_14

Writing scientific biographies evokes the problem of representativeness or of integrating the single case into more general questions of scholarly interest. The establishment of a link between micro and macrolevels inspired the present paper, which attempts to conceptualize the link between the individual biographical case and more general questions via the concept of microhistory. Microhistory does not present an easy solution to this problem, but it can generate sensitivity for the epistemological problems and narrative pitfalls of the biographical genre
After presenting a brief overview of the methodological foundations of microhistory, I evaluate publications on German sweets manufacturer Gebrüder Stollwerck AG as examples of microhistories of globalization and of kinship in entrepreneurial families. In a third step, I examine the specifics of entrepreneur biographies, paying particular attention to their narrative structure, as they tend to explain developments from within the black box of the entrepreneur or his family. There exists a broad spectrum of research questions that may go way beyond the chronological sequence of a biographical subject’s life course.
I suggest avoiding the pitfalls of the biographical method by linking the life of the subject to a reference value, to a research question that, in the best case, provides an experimental cardinal point outside of the object of study. In this sense, biographies — as well as case studies on companies — can be understood as microhistories of X.

In Palermo at the end of the 18th century, an old woman, a widow and a beggar, sells her "miraculous water" to some women who want to get rid of their husbands. A strange form of non-consensual divorce, interpreted as witchcraft and widely tolerated by the surrounding society. The judicial action of the court, influenced by enlightenment ideas, transforms magic into a crime of poisoning and condemns the witch to be hanged.

‘People’s history’ focuses on the lives of ordinary people, with an eye to their struggles, everyday practices, beliefs, values, and
mentalities. Influenced by the Annales School and cultural anthropology, but reacting against traditional social history’s
emphasis on social structures and serial trends, its practitioners emphasize the importance of individual agency while trying
to demonstrate the complexity of lived experience, the fluidity of identity, and the subjective nature of meaning. Important types of ‘people’s history’ include ‘history from below,’ Alltagsgeschichte (the ‘history of everyday life’), and ‘microhistory,’ all of which involve a dramatic reduction of historical scale, focusing on a single individual, community, or spectacular event.

Whittall Straddles Two Nations Having grown up in Smyrna in the mid-­‐19th century, James William Whittall used both his Ottoman upbringing and his British nationality to build a successful business, while at the same time becoming the face of British commerce in Istanbul. This mixture of ties to these nations afforded him great success within his business and his position at the British Chamber of Commerce, yet left him torn on policy issues between the two nations. Having grown up in the empire in a family well connected and experienced in the trade industry, Sir William fostered great friendships with local Ottoman peoples, while his British citizenry gave him advantageous regulations to live and operate his business within. Together these two factors allowed Sir William to become a well-­‐regarded figurehead of British-­‐ Ottoman trade, and J.W. Whittall & Co to operate for nearly one hundred years.

N.A. Selunskaya
In search of lost microhistory
The author asks the question: does microhistory exist now as a trend in historiography? She deals with theoretical principles of microhistory, and theo-retical adequacy of its premises; she also specifies the characterictic features of this trend. The article is focused on the development of humanities in Russia. It is shown that microhistory was accepted by Russian scholars, although they were aware of its limitations and conventionality.

Davide Tabor, Il cerchio della politica. Notabili, attivisti e deputati a Torino tra ‘800 e ‘900, Silvio Zamorani editore, Torino 2013, pp. 288, Euro 32,00

Il libro parla di politica e si concentra sui decenni tra Otto e Novecento, quando le trasformazioni sociali cominciarono a modificare il sistema politico italiano. Parla dell’Italia liberale, negli anni in cui iniziò ad allargarsi il corpo elettorale e dunque si estese la gamma degli interlocutori sociali dei candidati e delle associazioni, e quando tanto le istituzioni quanto le organizzazioni cominciarono ad affrontare il problema della partecipazione delle masse alla vita politica italiana. Parla di politica «alta» e di politica «bassa», di persone importanti, deputati, senatori e ministri, di individui comuni, artigiani, operai, membri di associazioni popolari, e di notabili di quartiere. Tra tutti questi attori, infatti, c’erano nessi, contatti e scambi, e la politica di massa sembrava il frutto, più che di una nazionalizzazione o di una mobilitazione dall’alto, dell’interazione tra i vari soggetti che da più parti contribuivano a costruire le organizzazioni e a definire i messaggi politici, in «alto» come in «basso». Il libro ha vinto il premio SISSCO-ANCI Storia 2014.

to hear from them whether this book advances the conversation about the complexities of the colonial project or whether it is simply a reflection of some of the attitudes that should be left in the past. The decolonisers would do well in reading this book as it will bolster their cause even more. It be more evidence for the need for white South Africans to account for the land question and the dispossession of African people. Writing the Ancestral River. A biography of the Kowie (Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2018, 193 pp. ISBN: 978-1-77614-187-6) Jacklyn Cock Christo Engelbrecht Microhistory Network

Evidence from house structures, artifacts and fauna are used to infer political and economic changes at the Benson site, a late sixteenth century Huron village near Balsam Lake, Ontario. It  is suggested that one household acquired trade links to Europeans in the St. Lawrence valley, and as a result became the largest and most prestigious household in the community. Subsequently, a second household expanded to a comparable size, but did so in opposition to the first house, and represented the “traditionalist” faction.  Ultimately, the traditionalist faction prevailed, and the more progressive house was dismantled, and its inhabitants moved elsewhere.

Open access:  http://sh.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1092923&dswid=-7744

After falling under the power of the Russian Crown, the Northern Black Sea steppe from the end of eighteenth century crystallized as the Russian government’s prime venue for socioeconomic and sociocultural reinvention and colonization. Vast ethnic, sociocultural and even ecological changes followed.  Present study is preoccupied with the marriage of the immigrant population from the German lands who came to the region in the course of its state orchestrated colonization, and was officially categorized as “German colonists.” The book illuminates the multiple ways in which marriage and household formation among the colonists was instrumentalized by the imperial politics in the Northern Black Sea steppe, and conditioned by socioeconomic rationality of its colonization. Marriage formation and dissolution among the colonists were gradually absorbed into the competencies of the colonial vertical power. Intending to control colonist marriage and household formation through the introduced marriage regime, the Russian government and its regional representatives lacked the actual means to exert this control at the local level. On the ground, however, imperial politics was mediated by the people it targeted, and by the functionaries tasked with its implementation. As the study reveals, the paramount importance was given to functional households and sustainable farms based on non-conflictual relations between parties. Situated on the crossroads of state, church, community, and personal interests, colonist marriage engendered clashes between secular and ecclesiastical bodies over the supremacy over it. The interplay of colonization as politics, and colonization as an imperial situation with respect to the marriage of the German colonists is explored in this book by concentrating on both norms and practices. Another important consideration is the ways gender and colonization constructed and determined one another reciprocally, both in legal norms and in actual practices. Secret divorces and unauthorized marriages, open and hidden defiance, imitations and unruliness, refashioning of rituals and discourses, and desertions – a number of strategies and performances which challenged and negotiated the marriage regime in the region, were scholarly examined for the first time in this book.

This article explores the historiographical,
empirical, and theoretical challenges of combining
ethnographic methods with sociohistory.
It shows why and how the unity of
the social sciences displays itself in the active
complementarity of ethnography and sociohistory.
The analysis of the concrete aspects
of this complementarity allows us to reformulate
the issue of interdisciplinarity beyond
the discourse of “alliances” or “exchanges”
between the disciplines. Against the prejudice
that archives belong only to historians and the
“field” to anthropologists and sociologists, we
attempt to answer the following question: in
what kind of historiographic work does this
complementarity of methods originate, and
what uses and categories does it refer to today
concretely?

Este artículo explora los retos historiográficos,
empíricos y teóricos de la combinación de los
métodos etnográficos con la sociohistoria.
Muestra por qué y de qué manera la unidad
de las ciencias sociales se despliega en la
complementariedad activa de la etnografía
y la sociohistoria. El análisis de los aspectos
concretos de esta complementariedad permite
explorar la cuestión de la interdisciplinariedad,
más allá del discurso de las “alianzas” o
del “intercambio” entre las disciplinas. Contra
el prejuicio de que los archivos les pertenecen
a los historiadores y el “campo” a los antropólogos
y sociólogos, se trata de contestar
la siguiente pregunta: ¿en qué tipo de trabajo
historiográfico se origina esta complementariedad
de métodos y a qué usos y categorías
se refiere concretamente hoy en día?

I selected the papers in this special issue from the September 2013 New Diplomatic History conference which I ran at Leiden University.
Introduction - Private Diplomacy: Making the Citizen Visible
Giles Scott-Smith
I: Messengers and Interest Groups
The ‘Piano Virtuosos’ of International Politics: Informal Diplomacy in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century Ottoman Empire
Andreas Rathberger
Activism, Diplomacy and Swedish-German Relations during WW I
Michael Jonas
II: Cultural Brokers
The International Relations of Thomas Mann in Early Cold War Germany
Kenneth H. Marcus
‘The Best Diplomats are often the Great Musicians’: Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philarmonic play Berlin
Jonathan Rosenberg
III: Mediators and ‘Fixers’
Winning the Cold War: Anti-Communism, Informal Diplomacy, and the Transnational Career of Jean Violet
Johannes Großmann
Between Dinner Table and Formal Diplomacy: Ernst van der Beugel as an Unofficial Diplomat for an Atlantic Community
Albertine Bloemendal
IV: Peacemakers
Humanitarian Aid or Private Diplomacy? Norman Cousins and the Treatment of Atomic Bomb Victims
Allen Pietrobon
A Dutch Dartmouth: Ernst van Eeghen’s Private Campaign to Defuse the Euromissiles Crisis
Giles Scott-Smith

Le fotografie della Resistenza italiana accumulate nel corso dei decenni sono migliaia: le hanno raccolte anzitutto gli ex partigiani, nel tentativo di tenere vivo, anche con le immagini, il ricordo della guerra di Liberazione.
Il libro parla di questi scatti e affronta il problema della memoria visuale della Resistenza indagandone i meccanismi di costruzione, la fisionomia e i caratteri di diffusione.
Nel novero delle raccolte fotografiche dedicate alla guerra e alla Resistenza in Italia, i tre album del comandante partigiano Ettore Serafino costituiscono in questo senso una fonte straordinaria: accompagnati da una ricca documentazione personale e creati unendo le riprese eseguite da lui stesso a quelle effettuate da altri autori, essi sono in grado di testimoniare il lungo processo di formazione
della memoria visuale di quella importante stagione.
La prima parte del libro si sofferma sulla produzione degli scatti ripercorrendo le vicende che anticipano la composizione dei tre volumi. La seconda si concentra sul loro montaggio e ordinamento
da parte di Serafino nell’immediato dopoguerra, e rivolge particolare attenzione alle diverse funzioni e modalità di impiego delle fotografie nel corso del tempo, in bilico tra fruizione privata e uso pubblico.

Reproducing the complexity of the situation that Poles and Jews found themselves in, as well as the entanglement of relations and differing attitudes, requires taking into account both perspectives. In this regard, "Night Without End" leaves something to be desired. Despite the fact that the authors draw on accounts of Polish witnesses, one gets the impression that the Polish (especially peasant) voice is barely heard in these analyses, functioning rather to complement and as an additional source for the reconstruction of the Jewish narrative.

This approach has serious consequences: the experience of Polish eyewitnesses in the countryside is removed from the context of the occupation and its specific conditions. Historian Mary Fulbrook has emphasized that the act of violence always takes place in a specific topographical and social context, and applies to all who found themselves in its vicinity. The question of Polish attitudes and their motivation would help to illuminate the social situation in which the inhabitants of a given county found themselves in under occupation. Complementing the narrative with a more careful reading of Polish (and especially peasant) testimonies would permit a more complete and more nuanced picture. The potential for drawing on the Polish wartime experience as a context that illuminates Polish-Jewish relations is shown in two chapters by Karolina Panz and Tomasz Frydel.

ABSTRACT: Although armies grew larger during the seventeenth century, size estimates are often inaccurate. This article uses diverse sources to produce accurate troop counts for Electoral Saxony during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), concluding that its army was large only briefly. It also discusses Saxony’s overlooked role in this war. This research suggests that the military revolution thesis should be revised: army sizes did not necessarily stabilize at higher levels and war did not necessarily “make the modern state.” Saxony went to war using traditional means of raising revenue: different states responded to their challenging environment differently.

Resumen
Este artículo está estructurado en tres partes. En la primera se expone el modelo de criminalidad medieval que las investigaciones han centrado en la conducta violenta y en el delito de homicidio como principal protagonista. En la segunda parte se explica el argumento del proceso de modernización de la criminalidad medieval, según el cual al final de la Edad Media se iniciaría un proceso de disminución multisecular de las tasas de delitos de sangre. En la tercera y última parte, se reflexiona sobre los límites interpretativos y metodológicos de este modelo de criminalidad medieval centrado en la violencia y su evolución posterior.
Palabras clave: criminalidad, violencia, homicidio, Edad Media, evolución de la criminalidad.

Abstract
The present paper is divided into three sections. The first one deals with that model of
medieval criminality in which research has focused on violent conduct and on the crime of homicide as a main issue. The second section accounts for the modernization process of medieval criminality. According to it, a multisecular decline in blood crimes rates would be started in the late Middle Ages. The third and final section offers some reflections on the interpretative and methodological boundaries of this medieval criminality model focused on violence and its subsequent evolution.
Keywords: criminality, violence, homicide, Middle Ages, evolution of criminality.

U članku se prikazuje razvoj sokolskog pokreta od prvih početaka u Češkoj i njegovo širenje u Hrvatskoj te istražuje povijest društva Hrvatski sokol u Makarskoj. Autor istražuje značenje sokolstva u Hrvatskoj, Dalmaciji i Makarskoj te uvjete njegova djelovanja. Poseban naglasak stavlja se na povezivanje sokolskog djelovanja s političkom situacijom u Hrvatskoj i Monarhiji te strankama koje su imale najveći utjecaj na Hrvatski sokol. Sokolsko društvo u Makarskoj osnovano je 1894., a prestalo je s djelovanjem 1914. uslijed zabrane rada sokolskim društvima u Monarhiji zbog početka Prvog svjetskog rata. U funkcioniranju mu je velike probleme stvarao otpor kotarskog poglavarstva i autonomaška stranka, no unatoč tome postiglo je veliki utjecaj u svakodnevnom gradskom životu.

„Jak nevděčně se chovají k českému duchovenstvu“ - Příspěvek k mikrohistorii Hořicka druhé poloviny 19. století. In: Jdi svou cestou a nech lidi mluvit. Variety sociálních a kulturních dějin. Profesoru Jaroslavu Čechurovi k 66. narozeninám. Opera Facultatis theologiae catholicae Universitatis Carolinae Pragensia. Historia et historia artium vol. XXXII. Eds. Oldřich Chládek, Tomáš Petráček, Jan Síč, Veronika Stachurová. Praha: Lidové Noviny 2018. ISBN 978-80-7222-629-8. S. 724-737. („How ungrateful they behave towards the Czech clergy“ - A Contribution to microhistory of the Town and County Hořice in the second Half of the 19th Century)
This study uses the parish chronicles of the town Hořice and two small rural parishes as the source of religious, social and cultural history. It treats complicated relations between the society and Catholic Church in the period of the rising nationalism, the situation of the workers and some aspect, including criminality, of the everyday life

Esta es la cuarta edición de la "Breve historia de Cuba", revisada y puesta al día (es decir, llegando hasta mayo de 2016)/ This is the fourth edition of the "Brief History of Cuba", revised and updated (ie, included the ongoing history until May 2016)

Thomas Robisheaux and I brought out) “Microhistory and the Historical Imagination: New Frontiers,” a special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Vol 47, No. 1 (Jan 2017) My own essay there is “The Macrohistory of Microhistory”): 53-73.

Note that, if you go see the issue, that it contains a very lively round-table featuring all the authors and their audience at the original Duke workshop. I cannot post the round-table without the permission of the participants, so I recommend that, if possible, you go find it.

By agreement with Robisheaux, our organizer, this essay, circulated in advance, aimed to provoke discussion. That is why it makes strong, even rash, claims for the utility of microhistory.

The author, Filip-Lucian Iorga, descendant of a family of freeholders from south-eastern Wallachia, started studying the genealogy of his family’s relatives, the Străjescu family, Moldavian boyars. Thanks to an unpublished genealogical tree of this family, belonging to the Mihai Dim. Sturdza archive, Filip-Lucian Iorga found out about the descendants of the Străjescu family from the Onul (Onou) family (Elena Străjescu married Constantin Onul). Filip Iorga started to investigate the Onou genealogy and the biographies of several members of the family, who served as Russian diplomats: Michel Onou (1835-1901; counselor at the Russian embassy in Constantinople, between 1869 and 1879 and Minister Plenipotentiary of Russia in Greece); and Michel Onou’s three sons: Alexandre Onou (1865-1935; historian and diplomat, consul-general of Russia in Great Britain, in 1917), Constantin Onou (1875-1950; chargé d’affaires of Russia in the United States, in 1917; diplomatic chancellor of the Russian White Armies under Generals Denikin and Wrangel, in 1919) and André Onou (1881-1950; Minister Plenipotentiary of Russia in Switzerland, in 1917). The marriages of the Onou are very interesting, because they prove the perfect integration of a Romanian family belonging to small nobility into the highest Russian aristocracy: Michel Onou married the Baroness Louise of Jomini (granddaughter of the famous military strategist and historian, General Antoine-Henri, Baron of Jomini); Alexandre Onou married Natalia Nikolaevna Golovina; Hélène (Elena) Onou (1870-1955) married Prince Wladimir Wladimirovich Trubetzkoy; Alexandra Onou (1873-1944) married Prince Vsevolod Nikolaevich Shakhovskoy, the last minister for Trade and Industry in the Tsar’s government (1916-1917); Constantin Onou married Catherine (Katia) Bouteneff. Future studies on the Onou genealogy will benefit from the recent discovery, by Filip-Lucian Iorga, of Katia Onou’s archives, in Italy.

Este artículo es una reflexión sobre la antropología histórica en el contexto académico nacional. Hace una exploración de su devenir, expresado en diversas modalidades de estudio, para demostrar su vigencia y plausibilidad, haciendo una propuesta ecléctica, para la comprensión dinámica de los grupos sociales particulares.

This chapter focuses on history writing about the Eastern Tibetan kingdom of Nangchen based on newly published local chronicles that legitimize Nangchen as an autonomous power centre, opposing official state views on its peripherality. These historical narratives centre on an idealized concept of kingship deeply rooted in the Tibetan Buddhist orthodoxy, myth, and ritual. The contemporary remembering of the legitimate Nangchen kings' lineage transcends a revival of traditional historiography or nostalgia, and has the capacity to repair the broken connection with local tradition and to re-emphasize the value of the landscape as its container. The narrative return of the good kings becomes an important factor in the reconstruction of local identity.

The Countryside under the Collectivisation Knout: the Circumstances of an Exemplary “Kulak” Trial.
The study is concerned with the status of private farmers in the period of collectivisation of Czech agriculture in fifties of 20th century. This decade had fatal consequences and at the same time we can say still has the basic upshot. In the period of ten years the number of private farmers was considerably reduced. The process of collectivization is monitored from regional point of view, in small village Svatojansky Ujezd situated in former district of Nova Paka.
The private farmers, by communist propaganda disparagingly called “the village rich” or “kulaks”, were systematically restricted and persecuted. It happened so under the ideological slogan about “sharpening class struggle”. In this way were prevented from hiring labour, had their savings and machinery confiscated and were subjected to a number of other measures forcing them into decline. They were obligated to deliver a large amount of produce. No fulfilment of delivery represented fines, confiscations or even jail. Among the most drastic measures were those taken not only against convicted farmers but also against their spouses, elderly parents, children and other relatives. These included the cancelling of rations, bans from education at chosen schools, confiscation of property. Such measures are described in this study on an example of agrarian families of Josef Novotny and Josef Machytka and their exemplary political trial.
Author describes by which way the state-wide directed agricultural policy was shown into the living on Hradec Kralove countryside with the focus on Svatojansky Ujezd and its close neighbourhood. Through the fates of local farmers reveals the operating and the consequents the policy of repression, which involved methods of economic discrimination, intentional administrative obstruction, denunciations as so as judicial and police repression. Through regional histories author points out the characteristic features of the communist forced and violent collectivization of Czech agriculture. Ultimately consequently hindered economic development in the agricultural socialistic sector and seriously disrupted social relations inside village communities. The presented study gathers exclusively of previously unpublished archive records, reminiscence of eyewitnesses (oral history), penal file of then district court and rarely preserved correspondence between prosecutors.