Microhistory
What if your ninety-two-year-old mom died, and you were cleaning out her attic, and you found one of those old round birth-control-pill dispensers with the bubble plastic and foil inserts?
You could write a good journal article on that “useless” object, if you’d done enough homework, and that article would be called a “microhistory.” In fact, if you donated an object like that to a good museum, the catalog description that the collections manager wrote for it would be a sort of micro-microhistory.
I contend that the birth control pill was probably the most important technological rupture of the twentieth century, if we are going to get into trying to rank such things. A whole shelf of good books has been written about it. But one can certainly write a history of the birth control pill without writing a microhistory. The microhistory approach tells the history of a particular object, like the particular dispenser your mom chucked in a box for some reason, or a house, or a ship. A biography, if well-situated in historical context, is a form of microhistory.
The microhistory uses its “small” subject to tackle a “bigger” subject. As “big” a subject as the development and adoption of the birth control pill is, from the standpoint of the history of medicine, it’s even bigger from the standpoint of the history of our whole society. Humans have been around for several hundred thousand years. At least some adult human females have had the means to control their own reproduction, with near-100% reliability and safety, for about fifty years. This is a technological change of far greater import than even the ability to fly through the sky at the speed of sound.
Last year, I got an e-mail from a historian at York University in Toronto, asking me a question. We discovered that each of us (he with a co-author) had ship microhistories coming out this year—his and his co-author’s on the Edwin Fox, a nineteenth century India-built East Indiaman whose career reached the turn of the twentieth century, and mine on a small Boston-built schooner named Sultana, used by the Royal Navy around 1770. That turned into a panel for last weekend’s Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, in Philadelphia, called “Maritime Microhistory and Public History: Global Perspectives.” What remains of their ship, and a replica of mine, receive hundreds to thousands of visitors a year. What microhistories do these ships tell their visitors? How can they help them understand that what we call “globalization” is far older than that term?
Our third panelist told us what we could find in the huge collection of “crew agreements” held by Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, where she and I both studied. These are official records, kept on board, of the people and goings-on aboard ship in the nineteenth and early twentieth century British merchant fleet—and if ever any fleet was global, that was it. These contain data to mine—how many people in the crew, median ages, ton-per-man ratios—if that’s what you’re after. They also contain, perhaps, the name and part of the life story of your great-grandfather. One contains terse mention of a woman aboard giving birth to a stillborn infant, whose body was “committed to the sea”—a whole human story in one short sentence, and there are thousands of those.
Before MUN agreed to take them, these documents had been purged from the National Archives for lack of space, and were slated to be burned.
We have microhistories all around us, waiting to be discovered and told. They are in archives, and tied up to docks. They are walking down the street. We are living and loving and dying inside their walls. We have picnics under their branches. We throw them away, and let them decay. Maybe one day we find what’s left of them—some timbers in a mud bank, some letters in a moldy old box, a plastic pill dispenser—and we go to some trouble to tell their stories, because they can teach us.
Edwin Fox: https://www.ed
Sultana: https://sultanaeducation.org/schooner-sultana/
The “crew agreements” at MUN: https://mha.mun.ca/mha/mlc/index.php
Very much enjoyed this one.