Nine Questions for James S. Amelang

2010

Social Evolution & History, 2018

The following paper is a michrohistorical intervention in one aspect of David Graeber's meta-narrative in Debt: the First 5,000 years. Graeber posits four overarching cycles of world history based on the alternation of the systematic use of coinage and virtual credit money. This grand narrative is set explicitly in the context of world-systems analysis and has received surprisingly little attention from scholars. In this intervention, I define what microhistorical practice is, I situate microhistory in the intellectual context of intervening in large grand narratives-either to shed light on them, problematize them, raise new questions about them, or perhaps even in some cases overturn them. Microhistorians do not avoid narrative, but they seek a return to narrative through a close analysis of small events situated within larger frameworks. Finally, I explore preliminary and approximate applications of microhistory to the Axial Age bullion cycle, one cycle in the great alternations between credit and coin. I focus on one specific philosopher-Plato, and create a microhistorical account of his actual relationship with Archytas, a Pythagorean philosopher, who I claim, is the living inspiration for the philosopher king's in Plato's utopian imaginary Kallipolis, the famous ideal city-state of his Republic. Microhistory is a historical practice aimed at a return to narrative through detailed analysis of primary documents. Microhistorians are generally concerned with overlooked persons, and marginalized voices. They wish to gain understanding and insight into the properties of large-scale global processes and events by looking at the finely textured details of everyday life during the chosen time period under study. Ideally, a microhistory will not simply be a biography, nor will it be primarily the analysis of a small village, although a person's life or village can serve as a site of analysis. Instead, microhistorical practice is about developing an observational lens, or a point of view, onto larger landscapes and structures of history.

2022

Despite multitudinous efforts from historians, an agreed-upon definition of microhistory has remained elusive. Indeed, since the field’s inception in Italy in the 1970s, microhistory has evolved and meant different things to different constituencies within and beyond the academy

In my previous work I have established a theoretical framework called ‘the Singularization of History’by criticizing the way social, cultural and microhistorians have practiced their scholarship in the last two or three decades. I have paid particular attention to one element common to the theoretical orientations of all microhistorians, viz. the connections between micro and macro. Microhistorians of all persuasions emphasize the importance of placing small units of research within larger contexts. I refute this principle and demonstrate its inherent contradictions. I encourage historians to cut the umbilical cord that ties them to what has been called ‘a great historical question’. The challenge of my paper will be to consider whether this research focus excludes the global perspective from historical inquiry. If that is not the case, what is the best possible approach to gain that vision?

Past and Present, 2019

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

Transatlantica, 2012

Revue d'études américaines. American Studies Journal 2 | 2012 Cartographies de l' Amérique / Histoires d'esclaves Microhistory, Biography, Fiction

Microhistory is a relative recent approach in history, dating back from the late 1970's. Nevertheless, considering its evolutive features and the developments that it has experienced since its first introduction by historians, any analysis thereon includes the prerequisite to roughly define the notion as I intend to use it in my developments to follow. I would then suggest that such a definition includes the ideas of (i) scope, (ii) historiographical background and (iii) relationship with sources .

Journal of Microhistory, 2008

This paper will answer three questions. First, in what way are they different. Second, in what way are they connected. Moreover, finally, do the three streams of history complement each other or do they conflict with one another, and if so, in what way and to what degree. This paper will examine all three levels of historical studies and will argue that they are all, in fact, necessary in order to give a complete picture and definition of historical events which, in turn, have defined history more holistically. In this paper the argument that no single level of historical study should be a “stand alone.” solution, but instead, all three levels are incomplete until and unless they work together to form a genuinely composite picture of the event or era under consideration. In order to do this, each method will need a general definition of their approach to history, which will be identified and elucidated.

Journal of Social History, 2003

This article discusses the new microhistory of the 1970s and 1980s in terms of the concept of exceptional typical, and contrasts the new microhistory to old microhistory, in which the relationship between micro and macro levels of phenomena was defined by means of the concepts of exceptionality and typicality. The focus of the essay is on Carlo Ginzburg's method of clues, Walter Benjamin's idea of monads, and Michel de Certeau's

2021

This book aims to demonstrate how scholars in recent times have been utilizing egodocuments from various angles and providing an opening for the multivocality of the sources to be fully appreciated. The first part of the book is concerned with the significance of egodocuments, both for the individual him/herself who creates such documents, and also for the other, who receives them. The author approaches the subject on the basis of his own personal experience, and goes on to discuss the importance of such documents for the academic world, emphasizing more general questions and issues within the fields of historiography, philosophy of history, microhistory, and memory studies. The second part of the book is based upon a photographic collection-an archive-that belonged to the author's grandfather, who over decades accumulated photographs of vagabonds and outsiders. This part seeks to explore what kind of knowledge can be applied when a single source-an archive, document, letter, illustration, etc.-is examined, and whether the knowledge derived may not be quite as good in its own context as in the broader perspective.

Papers of the Institute of Archaeology, 2019

Archaeology has always kept an inconsistent relationship with history. For decades, archaeology has either largely rejected what history could offer, such as among certain processual archaeologists, or it has cherry-picked certain elements of historical methods. The closest that archaeologists have ever come to establishing a complete historical method to be applied in archaeology was through the adoption of the idea of the Annales School of history. Part of what made the Annales School so attractive to archaeologists of all backgrounds was that it tackled the past in a way that was very practical and useful for archaeology: it engaged with the past in the form of total histories, which could then be segmented in three separate durations and could be studied in an interdisciplinary manner. Additionally, the way the Annales School envisaged the past allowed for the study of the past in a very scientific way (e.g. quantitative, statistical), but also allowed the qualitative study of mentalities of the past people under analysis. However, one of the greatest problems of the Annales School is that it suppressed the human agent. Whether they were hidden behind structural economic forces or long-term symbolic structures, the individual remained always buried under the large-scale — history, according to annalistes, could not be the result of individual action. This, in turn, is what eventually led to the demise of the Annales School, in favour of the Italian microhistory. Does this mean that the AnnalesSchool of History must be complete scraped? No, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate that archaeology can in fact have a fruitful historical paradigm based on some ideas of the Annales School, and at the same time, some ideas of Italian microhistory. This would require understanding microhistory as the reconstruction of the life of agents, small-scale case-studies that serve as exemplars of large-scale phenomena.

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 47 (2017) 1. 193–198.