History from Below, the History of Everyday Life, and Microhistory

Andrew I Port, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA

2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Peoples history focuses on the lives of ordinary people, with an eye to their struggles, everyday practices, beliefs, values, and
mentalities. Inuenced by the Annales School and cultural anthropology, but reacting against traditional social historys
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 uidity of identity, and the subjective nature of meaning. Important
types of peoples 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.

The Origins, Characteristics, and Goals of Peoples
History
Peoples history marks a radical departure from traditional
mainstream historiography, which long tended to concentrate
on high-level politics and diplomacy, warfare, and the lives of
great statesmen. The move away from this focus on the high
and mighty began most systematically during the period
between the two world wars. Trying to understand social
dynamics and the ways in which societies change, the members
of the French Annales School embraced an interdisciplinary,
materialist approach that looked to the social sciences for
inspiration. At the same time, they shifted their attention away
from major events and powerful individuals to underlying
structural forces, mentalities, and the masses. Similar concerns
and methods inspired a group of Marxist historians active in
the United Kingdom after World War II, as well as a number of
historians working later in the United States. Turning their
attention to the lives and struggles of ordinary people, they
focused on social relations at the grass roots, popular forms of
protest, everyday activities such as work and leisure, as well as
attitudes, beliefs, practices, and behavior. This became known
in the 1960s as history from below.
It was out of this tradition, which signicantly broadened
the array of legitimate topics considered worthy of historio-
graphical investigation, that new variations of peoples history
Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life) in Germany,
microhistory in Italy and France emerged in the 1970s and
1980s. Despite some differences in their method and use of
sources, the two share a number of essential characteristics. In
the rst place, their practitioners focus on the qualitative,
quotidian, lived experiences of ordinary people, i.e., on the
actions, practices, habits, values, beliefs, mentalities, and feel-
ings of the oppressed, excluded, pauperized, and marginalized:
those who have traditionally been excluded from historical
accounts and remained largely anonymous in history the
nameless multitudes in their workaday trials and tribulations
(Ldtke, 1995: 4).
To that end, they dramatically reduce the scale of their
historical investigation, conning it to a single individual,
small community, or seemingly obscure event which is then
subject to painstaking microscopic analysis involving an
intensive study of the available documentary material.
Immersing themselves like detectives in seemingly mundane
sources related to themes such as everyday family life, gender
relations, leisure activities, and popular culture, they search for
and try to tease out the meaning of various clues, signs, and
symptoms all in the belief that microscopic observation will
uncover and explain the previously unobserved, as well as
other revealing phenomena lost to the type of conventional
analysis that takes a more comprehensive birds-eye view (Levi,
1991: 97, 106; Brewer, 2010: 97; Muir, 1991: xvixvii). The
focus on spectacular stories and obscure people are, in short,
devices to get at larger issues (Lepore, 2001: 144) while the
lingering over mere details represents an innovative attempt to
achieve the old dream of a total history, but this time recon-
structed from the bottom up (Steege et al., 2008: 375; Revel,
1995: 497).
Such histories usually fall into one of two categories: the
episodic and the systematic (Gregory, 1999: 102). The rst
type, which tends to take a narrative approach and rely heavily
on thick description, focuses on a single, spectacular episode
or event usually involving one person or a small group of
individuals such as the investigation of a heretical sixteenth-
century Italian miller by Inquisition ofcials (Ginzburg, 1980),
the elaborately staged murder of dozens of cats by disgruntled
apprentice printers in Paris in the 1730s (Darnton, 1984), or an
antisemitic riot incited by accusations of blood libel in a small
Prussian town in the early twentieth century (Smith, 2002). The
other type assiduously reconstructs the complex web of familial
and extrafamilial social relations in a small community.
Prominent examples include Giovanni Levis study of social
interaction in a village in the Piedmont in the 1690s a banal
place and an undistinguished story, in the words of the author
(Levi, 1988) and David Sabeans dense studies of property,
production, and kinship in the southern German village
Neckarhausen from 1700 to 1870 (Sabean, 1990, 1998).
The goals and value of such studies are manifold. In the rst
place, they are at pains to demonstrate the ways in which
ordinary people had agency and were not merely the victims of
large, amorphous, impersonal forces, i.e., that they were the
active subjects of their own lives not just the passive objects of
history. A great deal of attention is thus paid to their ability to
withstand hegemonic forms of dominance and control, i.e., to
an individuals constant negotiation, manipulation, choices
and decisions in the face of a normative reality which,

108 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 11 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.62156-6
 History from Below, the History of Everyday Life, and Microhistory
though pervasive, nevertheless offers many possibilities for
personal interpretations and freedoms (Levi, 1991: 94). This
focus on obscure individuals and the business of coping
(Bucur et al., 2009: 206) is also important because it vividly
reveals the multiplicity and extreme complexity of lived
experience, especially its more subjective dimensions in
concrete life situations. Such close-up investigations which
combine the warmth of the narrators intimate glance and
the coldness of the scientists detached observation
(Ginzburg, 1993: 16) lay bare the social production and
construction of meaning by individuals themselves in ways
that can hold up against the ruling discourses of a particular
society, the ambiguities and contradictions of perceptions
and behavior, as well as the way in which power relations
are reproduced and challenged in everyday exchanges (Eley,
1989: 315, 322323; Bucur et al., 2009: 195196).
The Role of Agency and the Reaction against
Structures, Serials, and Teleologies
Peoples history in all its forms traces its intellectual heritage to
Annales, but it is at the same time a conscious reaction against the
work of that school, as well as against the type of interdisci-
plinary social science history it inspired in France, the United
States, and Germany beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. The
latter, as practiced by leading historians such as Fernand Braudel
in France and later Hans-Ulrich Wehler in Germany, relied
heavily on sociological theories and techniques, focusing on
aggregate trends and numerical series (e.g., births, marriages,
deaths, prices, occupations) in an attempt to uncover long-
term, large-scale, measurable regularities, formulate historical
laws, and arrive at blanket generalizations about human
behavior (Revel, 1995; Eley, 2005).
Those who became disillusioned with this quantitative
approach launched a multipronged critique. They objected, in
the rst place, to the way it seemingly crushed all individuals
to insignicance under the weight of vast impersonal structures
and forces (Muir, 1991: xxi) and thus failed to take into
account the agency of ordinary people. Instead of consigning
the so-called masses to historical impotence, history from
below tries to show how they themselves contribute to,
appropriate, and shape broad supraindividual forces and
structures. They see historical change and continuity, in other
words, as the result of actions by groups and individuals who
are simultaneously both objects of history and its subjects
(Ldtke, 1995: 68).
In a sense, the way in which they problematize the rela-
tionship between agency and the iron cage of structure is
reminiscent of studies by so-called new cultural historians, who
question Marxist claims about the primacy of the material and
the social in the complicated relationship between base and
superstructure (Hunt, 1989). That said, historians of everyday
life and mirohistorians have been just as critical of
postmodernism, which the new cultural historians have
strongly embraced, as they have been of structuralism.
Whereas the latter seemingly erased the role of individuals,
the former has tried to kill off the subject completely (Steege
et al., 2008: 377) and thus call into question all claims about
human agency.
109
Those who practice various types of peoples history also
question the seemingly uniform, homogeneous way in which
social science history has portrayed social life across different
societies, as well as within any single society. They point instead
to the great variety and complexity of social relations, experi-
ences, behavior, and identities at the grass roots. This, they
claim, is something that a focus on aggregate trends, large-scale
processes, as well as overarching categories and groups (such as
workers) is, by its very nature, unable to grasp. They draw
attention to other supposed weaknesses of social science
history as well: its reliance, for example, on documents
usually produced by those in positions of power containing
material that can be serialized. What about documents and
documented practices, they ask, that do not readily lend
themselves to quantication, or those that are documentarily
unique what Franois Furet has suggestively referred to as
the hapax legomenon (Ginzburg, 1993: 21). The claim here is
that seemingly unique events and actions, as well as single
cases or episodes, that violate norms can, in fact, illustrate
underlying social structures, behaviors, and practices that
would otherwise remain undetected.
Besides criticizing the methodological shortcomings of
quantitative social science history and its macro approach,
which is seen as too deterministic and mechanistic, the prac-
titioners of peoples history have also strenuously objected to
the way it embraces grand narratives of progress above all
those associated with modernization theory and its single,
linear progressive model.against which all societies are
measured. The gold standard of development has been
Western afuence and the triumph of modern consumer
society (Brewer, 2010: 9394). By turning their attention to
the ways in which the losers of history and the casualties of
progress experienced modernity in all its facets, as well as to
fragmentation, contradictions, and plurality of viewpoints,
microhistorians and historians of the everyday look at social
strategies and concrete experiences that buck general trends
and thus fail to accord with the grand contours of history
identied by those who take a more capacious view of
historical developments. This allows them to emphasize the
importance of contingency and uncover, furthermore, the
social context in which an apparently anomalous or
insignicant fact assumes meaning, thus revealing the
hidden incoherences of an apparently unied social system
(Levi, 1991: 107; Ldtke, 1995: ix, 7).
Political Sensibilities and Intellectual Influences
The foregoing suggests the political agenda of everyday history
and microhistory, whose practitioners while highly critical of
Marxist structural history share Marxist critiques of liberal
conceptions of modernity and the steamroller effects of
capitalism, industrialization, and bureaucracy on the
downtrodden (Gregory, 1999: 101). Coming from a leftist
background, their political sensibilities were (re)formed in the
crucible of the 1970s, a period of political inertia and
economic stagnation that not only marked the end of the
trentes glorieuses in the West, but also called into question
following the turbulence of the late 1960s Marxisms
scientic premises and promises about the progressive nature
110 History from Below, the History of Everyday Life, and Microhistory
and emancipatory power of the industrial proletariat (Bell,
2002). It was in this atmosphere, characterized by a new
reticence about progress and modernity, that a certain
nostalgia for the preindustrial past ourished. In fact, this
backward-looking romantic opposition to capitalism and late
modernity helps explain why so many pioneering
microhistorical studies have looked at communities
and mentalities during the early modern period (Ginzburg,
1993: 20).
The critique of Western ethnocentrism that accompanied
this rejection of modernist teleology reects the strong inu-
ence that cultural anthropology has had on the eld of
everyday history. In fact, its practitioners self-consciously adopt
a variety of ethnographic methods and insights, such as
Franz Boas and Claude Lvi-Strausss ideas about cultural
relativism, as well as concepts such as Clifford Geertzs thick
description, which emphasizes the importance of social
context, signs, and symbolism in understanding the cultural
meaning of human behavior and practices. Like
ethnographers, they try, by way of written documents and
other sources, to immerse themselves in the daily lives of
those they study, with an eye to uncovering routine and
repetitive acts that, they believe, reveal the dominant and
underlying forms of a given culture. These are then decoded
or read like any text, be it written or spoken, gestured or
performed (Highmore, 2002b; Rosenhaft, 1987).
As the practitioners of microhistory and the history of
everyday life have pointed out themselves, there are a number of
other pan-European inuences on their work from the literary
practices of Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace to modernist authors
such as Marcel Proust and Italo Calvino, from Siegfried
Kracauers ideas about cinema and the supposedly
discontinuous nature of reality to neorealist Italian lm.
Other discernible inuences include sociologist Erving
Goffmans theories about the performative aspects of everyday
interactions, Pierre Bourdieus theory of practical action,
Henri Lefebvres evocative work on everyday life in the
modern world, as well as Michel de Certeaus ruminations on
social practices and the reappropriation of cultural objects
in resistance to the rhythms and demands of consumerist
modernity. Michel Foucaults work on persecution, madness,
and the oppressive nature of modern institutions, as well as
Sigmund Freuds attention to language and the way in which
tries, slips, and other insignicant details can alert us to and travelogues; parish registers, wills, notarial records, and
hidden meanings, have been important as well (Levi, 1991;
Brewer, 2010; Muir, 1991; Highmore, 2002b).
Among historians the greatest inuence has undoubtedly
been E.P. Thompson, the doyen of self-critical Marxist
historians associated with the British New Left. His
pioneering work The Making of the English Working Class
effectively launched history from below in the 1960s, with
its emphasis on consciousness, culture, and the everyday
conditions and practices of those obscure individuals he
hoped to rescue.from the enormous condescension of
posterity. Equally important were Thompsons ideas about
crowd rationality and the central role of experience in
identity formation (Thompson, 1963, 1971; Eley, 1989:
313). History from below subsequently ourished in the
United Kingdom and the United States, but it was in Italy
and Germany that it assumed radical new forms. The main
practitioners in Italy were active in the northern part of the
country, which, as a whole, did not have a strong social
history tradition. Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanno Levi, and other
Italian microhistorians coalesced around the Bolognese
journal Quaderni storici, which began publishing specimens of
the new genre in the late 1970s. Along with Lutz
Niethammer, Gttingen historians Alf Ldtke and Hans
Medick established the practice of Alltagsgeschichte north of
the Alps in Germany, where they published much of their
own innovative work, as well as that of their colleagues, in
the journal Historische Anthropologie. Though they share
comparable concerns and reect similar inuences,
Alltagsgeschichte and microhistory are not entirely the same
undertaking. Whereas the latter gravitates toward the
spectacular and unique in order to get at lived experience
itself, the former focuses on largely unconscious, routine, and
repetitive acts in an attempt to reconstruct social
relationships and daily transactions which, they believe, are
themselves the key to understanding historical development
(Gregory, 1999: 103104).
There are no American or French schools strictly speaking,
but Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Darnton, and a number of
other scholars in the United States produced a series of path-
breaking studies that belong to this eld as did the French
historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, whose reconstruction of
social life in a medieval village became a model of the genre
(Le Roy Ladurie, 1978).
Critiques of Microhistory and Alltagsgeschichte
In their classic studies Montaillou and The Cheese and the Worms,
Le Roy Ladurie and Carlo Ginzburg both relied heavily on
detailed interrogations of alleged heretics conducted by
members of the Inquisition in France and Italy. Reading these
sources against the grain, they picked out banal details and
documentary fragments to get at larger historical issues as well
as at more general socioeconomic and cultural patterns such
as the complex relationship between elite and popular culture.
Since the focus is on those who, as a rule, left behind few
written documents themselves, other important sources have
included reports by police and church ofcials, teachers,
physicians, and factory inspectors; personal correspondence
protocols.
The often ingenious use of seemingly mundane source
material has been widely praised by other scholars. But this
reliance on documents left by the rich and powerful to get at
the lives of the poor and oppressed has also been a source of
hefty criticism. For instance, many of these documents, such as
legal ones used in court cases, were designed to deceive and
distort reality in ways that some historians have supposedly
failed to grasp (Kuehn, 1989). The need for careful and the
possibility of sloppy source critique is not peculiar to
microhistory and the history of everyday life, of course. Still,
its practitioners especially microhistorians have been
especially sensitive to the potential dangers of using
documents originally intended to convey information that is
much different from the focus of their own scholarly
pursuits. This is why many have consciously integrated their
 History from Below, the History of Everyday Life, and Microhistory
research procedures and source analysis into the narrative itself.
As Ginzburg and Levi explain, the obstacles interfering with the
research, such as lacunae or misrepresentations in the sources,
were constituent elements of the documentation and thus
became an intrinsic part of the account. Similarly, the
hypotheses, the doubts, the uncertainties, as well as the
researchers very procedure and point of view are all included
in the narration (Ginzburg, 1993: 2223, 28; Levi, 1991:
106). By revealing their bag of tricks, they create a sort of
Brechtian estrangement effect that defamiliarizes or
denaturalizes the seemingly familiar and thus offers an
especially tting form for depicting the complexity of the
everyday (Highmore, 2002b: 2123).
Another weighty critique concerns the possibility that these
historians will interpret sources, persons, and events in an
anachronistic or ahistorical manner. The use of modern cate-
gories and discourses to describe and explain earlier experi-
ences (instead of examining them on their own terms), as well
as the imposition of present sensibilities on the past, are all
potential hazards of the enterprise but again, not ones strictly
limited to the various forms of peoples history. Still, the
difculty of interpreting past behavior and understanding the
meaning(s) that historical actors ascribed to their actions is
a staggeringly difcult enterprise (Bell, 2002: 271).
Microhistorians and historians of the everyday also run the
risk, and have been faulted for, romanticizing the past,
focusing on picturesque detail, and sentimentally celebrating
ordinary people as heroes, proto-feminists, or freedom
ghters; others have accused them of trivializing the crimes
committed by oppressive regimes such as the Third Reich by
overstating the possibilities for resistance and nonconformity
at the grass roots (Ldtke, 1995: 1012).
All of this draws attention to one of the great philosophical
debates that microhistory and the history of everyday life bring
front and center: the relationship between structure and agency,
between free will and determinism. In fact, one of the greatest
challenges of the genre is navigating between the Scylla of blind
historical forces that determine individual behaviors, and the
Charybdis of a romanticized self-determination by radically free
historical actors (Gregory, 1999: 105) i.e., not exaggerating or
distorting the possibilities of agency in highly repressive societies
(or in ones that used more rened methods of repression and
surveillance in an effort to ensure conformity), or of
downplaying the extent to which larger structures and
institutional forces shape the lives of ordinary individuals. As
Karl Marx famously put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte (1852), Men make their own history, but they do
not make it just as they please; they do not make it under
circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
already existing, given, and transmitted from the past. But
historians of everyday life try to show the ways in which
collective phenomena are themselves the very result of
individual agency and the actions of ordinary people: The
systems that presumably govern the world are not alien to
everyday life but immanent in it; the living of everyday life
itself is itself part and parcel of the process by which structure
and ideology are reproduced and transformed. In other
words, ordinary people themselves supposedly hold the lions
share of responsibility for making that collective world
(Steege et al., 2008: 367368, 372).
111
Scholars working on everyday life in Germany during the
Third Reich have, in fact, been especially adept at describing the
ambivalences and ambiguities (Eley, 1989: 325) the dark
side (Port, 2013) of behavior at the grass roots, pointing
out the ways in which ordinary Germans supported and
proted from the regimes discriminatory policies at the same
time that they bucked the system and pursued their own
interests. Alf Ldtke has aptly described this practice
involving both complicity and resistance as Eigensinn,
a notoriously difcult term to translate or even dene
precisely, but one that draws attention to the sliver of
autonomy (Bucur et al., 2009: 190) enjoyed by the
seemingly powerless and weak while, at the same time,
rightly emphasizing the ambiguous and multivalent nature of
most behavior (Ldtke, 1995). This draws attention, in turn,
to the way in which the everyday provides both a training
ground of sorts for conformity, as well as a site where
conformity can be evaded and acts of nonconformity can
take place (Highmore, 2002b: 5).
Historians of everyday life and microhistorians have also
had to contend with another criticism frequently leveled since
local or case studies rst became popular in the 1960s: this
involves the extent to which the individual, community, or
event at the center of a given study are truly representative of
larger trends. All persons, communities, and historical events
are in some way unique, of course. But since the adoption of
social science methods and insights in historical research, as
well as E.H. Carrs calls in the early 1960s for a greater emphasis
on causation and sophisticated historical analysis (as opposed
to mere narration), historians have been at pains to make
larger analytical claims about the importance of their own
often narrowly focused studies and relate the particular to the
general, i.e., to larger historical trends and developments.
Microhistorians have been especially cognizant of this
thorny challenge, given the radically reduced scale of their
investigations, as well as their resolute insistence on context.
Some concede the need for a comparative dimension, i.e., the
need to compare their ndings and conclusions to other
similarly circumscribed studies. But they rightly insist that
some issues can best be understood at the micro level and
others, for that matter, at the macro level. Institutions and
institutional power, for example, would fall into the latter
category, intimate relationships within the family and the
very uidity of identity in the other. A focus on formal power
relations, institutions, and high-level policy often fails to
comprehend or explain how and why things developed as
they did on the ground often in ways not intended by
authorities and elites, as recent research on everyday life in
the Soviet bloc has revealed (Port, 2007). In other words, the
microphysics of power at the grass roots can effectively serve
to undermine and mitigate against the power of larger
structural forces and processes (Steege et al., 2008: 361). Still,
integrating and relating those two levels in a meaningful
manner balancing intimacy and distance, establishing
causal connections is one of the greatest challenges faced
by microhistorians and historians of the everyday. The
following cartographic analogy is useful for making this
point: it is a mistake to hand someone an architectural
blueprint if he or she wants to drive to another city. The key
is knowing which map we need in a particular instance, and
112 History from Below, the History of Everyday Life, and Microhistory
how to combine harmoniously maps of different scales
(Gregory, 1999: 109). Siegfried Kracauer believed that Marc
Bloch, one of the founders of the Annales School, offered
a venerable model in his two-volume Feudal Society
(193940), which provides a constant back and forth
between micro- and macrohistory, between close-ups and
extreme long shots (Levi, 1991: 27).
In response to the issue of representativeness, micro-
historians in particular have embraced the concept of the
normal exception, a term originally coined by Edoardo
Grendi. These are forms of seemingly unusual behavior that
defy prevailing norms, which is the very reason they leave traces
in the archives. But they do so on a regular basis, and though
contrary to what those in power and other elites consider to be
normal behavior are completely normal for ordinary
individuals, especially those on the socioeconomic margins
of society. Such transgressions are, in fact, perfectly
representative of their own social milieu (Muir, 1991: xiv).
Of course, the ability to recognize something as a normal
exception in the rst place posits an a priori grasp of larger
patterns only afforded by a macro view. The focus on that
which fails to t into grand frameworks or narratives, that
throws a wrench in the relentless search for regularity and
predictability, highlights, in short, the complexity of reality,
of the really real which is, after all, what everyday life at
the grass roots truly claims to represent, or at least one
signicant aspect of it.
The Future of Peoples History
The history of everyday life and microhistory enjoyed tremen-
dous popularity in the 1980s. Alltagsgeschichte itself was hailed
at the time as the most important new departure in West
German historiography (Eley, 1989: 297). But by the end of the
following decade, it, along with social history as a whole, had
been largely eclipsed by the new cultural history popular in
the United States, which looked to the insights of post-
modernism and the so-called linguistic turn for inspiration.
Despite important differences in terms of method,
assumptions, and intellectual inuences, all of these new
approaches shared a certain afnity in terms of what they
criticized about the older historiographys focus on major
events, powerful individuals, and dominant institutions
and then, with the rise of social science history, on the gothic
structures and intangible historical forces associated with
a steadfast materialist interpretation of how history works.
Even though history from below, microhistory, and
Alltagsgeschichte are no longer as popular as they once were,
reports of their death have indeed been greatly exaggerated
(Steege et al., 2008: 358). A number of historians in Europe
and the United States continue to produce important speci-
mens of this genre and continue to discuss its theoretical
underpinnings and potential contributions for example, in
writing about the states that made up the now-defunct Soviet
bloc. By examining the complex relationship between state
and society, their post-1945 history suggests the fruitful
ways in which an understanding of life at the grass roots can
help explain developments and trajectories that an
investigation of institutions, parties, and high-level politics
cannot alone. It shows, in short, that even under regimes
where the power relationship between the rulers and ruled
was clearly asymmetrical, developments at the micro level
could and did have a major inuence on those at the macro.
It is a truism that contemporary politics can have a signi-
cant effect on the types of history pursued by a given genera-
tion, as well as on the research topics that interest its members.
The sudden popularity of history from below in the 1960s
especially the interest in ordinary people, social protest, and
the behavior of crowds clearly reected the political
turmoil, social upheaval, and critical atmosphere of that
decade. Changing political sensibilities and disappointments
have since then marked a dramatic shift away from an
interest in the plight of the working classes to that of other
groups, including women, ethnic minorities, and colonial
subjects. As Wendy Goldman has noted, Today, historians
seem more interested in identity, nationality, ethnicity,
globalisation, and transnational histories, which reect in
turn preoccupations of our contemporary world (Bucur
et al., 2009: 199). That is undoubtedly true, yet recent
political developments in a world increasingly dominated by
global nancial institutions and structures seemingly beyond
the control of ordinary individuals from the Arab Spring
in the Middle East to the emergence of the Occupy
Movement in the West might very well spark a renewed
interest in peoples history and the emphasis it places on the
power and agency of ordinary individuals.
See also: Annales School; Anthropology and History; Boas,
Franz (18581942); Cultural History; Ethnography; Everyday
Life, Anthropology of; Family and Kinship, History of; Foucault,
Michel (192684); Geertz, Clifford (19262006); Goffman,
Erving (19221982); Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender,
Queer: Bear and Leather Subcultures; Levi-Strauss, Claude
(19082009); Life-style, History of the Concept; Materiality and
Culture; Thick Description: Methodology.
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Relevant Websites
www.microhistory.org Microhistory.org.
www.microhistory.eu/bibliography.html Microhistory.org Bibliography.
www.mulino.it/edizioni/riviste/issn/0301-6307 il Mulino.
www.werkstattgeschichte.de History Workshop.