You do realize that now I'm going to have to find The Great Influenza, right? I adore micro-histories like that. Have you ever seen the one about the Great Molasses Flood in Boston? It's fascinating and kind of gross.
When I was in college, I took a historiography class in which the professor lamented this trend toward micro-histories. I was utterly baffled. I almost never read the massive mult-volumed sets that used to be popular. It took me three years to get through the first five volumes of Dostoevskii's massive bio set, and I love Dostoevskii. It was just too freaking long. I mean, obviously we don't want to lose our ability to look at history in a larger framework, but it's the details that humanize the past and make us remember it. I retained far more of the historical detail I picked up in trashy romance novels than the stuff I was forced to memorize in History of Modern Asia.
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Date: 2005-08-02 03:15 pm (UTC)When I was in college, I took a historiography class in which the professor lamented this trend toward micro-histories. I was utterly baffled. I almost never read the massive mult-volumed sets that used to be popular. It took me three years to get through the first five volumes of Dostoevskii's massive bio set, and I love Dostoevskii. It was just too freaking long. I mean, obviously we don't want to lose our ability to look at history in a larger framework, but it's the details that humanize the past and make us remember it. I retained far more of the historical detail I picked up in trashy romance novels than the stuff I was forced to memorize in History of Modern Asia.