Microhistory and the Post-Modern Challenge

Through a pupil's eyes […]. A “chalk face” study on ideological conflict in a Flemish school during World War II

“…The events discussed here connect with aspects of both educational and political history, and the diary demonstrates "that members of the lower orders were agents whose actions affected the (sometimes limited) world in which they lived" (Brown, 2003).…”

Long Time Coming, Long time Gone: the Past, Present and Future of Social History

“…The potentiality of microhistory lies in its power to recover and reconstruct past events by exploring and connecting a wide range of data sources, social, cultural, environmental and material, "so as to produce a contextual, three-dimensional, analytic narrative in which actual people as well as abstract forces shape events". 35 Lastly, microhistory addresses the issue of scalability. It is an, maybe even the only, historical approach that enables us to explore the myriad ways that people experienced in their daily lives the major developments occurring at the macro scale.…”

Evocative research in art history and beyond: imagining possible pasts in theWays to Heavenproject

“…depends not on the extraction of an abstract set of principles, and still less on the application of a theoretical model, but rather on an encounter with the singular, the specific, and the individual' (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000, p. 6; also cf. their book on new historicism, Geertz [1983] on local knowledge, Gray [2001] and Brown [2003] on microhistories). Consequently, the questions we began asking were close to those proposed by the eighteenth-century German (Herder 1993).…”