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History vocabulary · Historiography and Historical Thinking

Microhistory

Meaning in history, with examples

/ˈmaɪkrəʊˌhɪstri/nounAdvanced term

In history, microhistory means: An approach to history that studies a small unit in great detail, such as one person, village, event or court case, to throw light on larger questions.

In Turkish: mikrotarih

How it is used

Developed by Italian historians in the 1970s and 1980s. A classic example is Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms (1976), about a sixteenth-century miller. Microhistories often rely on court records and other detailed archival sources.

Example sentences

  1. Her microhistory of one Anatolian village draws on a single court register.

  2. Microhistory asks what the life of one ordinary person can reveal about a whole society.

Common collocations

  • a microhistory of
  • a microhistorical approach
  • Italian microhistory
  • write a microhistory
  • historiographyThe writing of history, and especially the study of how historians have written about a subject over time, which sources they used and how their views changed.
  • social classA group of people in a society who share a similar economic position, such as wealth, occupation or education, and often similar status and opportunities.
  • archiveA collection of historical records kept for long-term use, or the building or institution where such records are stored and made available to researchers.
  • primary sourceEvidence created at the time being studied or by people who witnessed it, such as letters, diaries, official records, photographs or objects.

More terms: Historiography and Historical Thinking

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