#microhistory

Relics of War: The History of a Photograph

'Relics of War', authored by Jennifer Raab, is a fascinating and, at the same time, poignant book, studying the American Civil War through the lens of one photograph. Profoundly insightful and replete with moral weight, the study makes for an engaging read. It will be of interest to general readers, art historians, history enthusiasts, photographers, as well as specialists of American Civil War history.

Centered on the period of the American Civil War, Relics of War: The History of a Photograph is unique in that, rather than focusing merely on the political facets of the War, it examines the impact it had on the lives of the common people, particularly the foot soldiers. Moving away from the established narratives, this work discusses the ramifications of the War through a photograph. The book discusses the circumstances in which the said photograph was taken and its symbolic importance. In 1865, Raab notes, Clara Barton, the future founder of the American Red Cross, paid a visit to the notorious Confederate prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia. During her visit to this site, Barton came across several belongings of prisoners of war, which she collected. The majority of these relics, including, among others, whittled spoons, woven reed plates, a piece from the prison’s ‘dead line’, and a tattered Bible, belonged to the missing and the dead soldiers. Subsequently, this ‘rich’ collection of artefacts was brought back by Barton to the Missing Soldiers Office in Washington, DC.

Once in the Office, these artefacts were presented to individuals from various walks of life, including politicians, journalists, war veterans and their families, and social activists. Finally, these relics were arranged by Clara Barton in an altar shape and photographed by her colleague, Mathew Brady. This image, reproduced in Raab’s book, is powerful, to say the least. The photograph underscores the volatile relationship that existed between facets like suffering, martyrdom, and justice during the War years. Raab’s work conclusively demonstrates the importance of this one image in Barton’s ambitious project of documenting the victims of the War.

Raab highlights the fact that a substantial number of people who died in the American Civil War remained unnamed. Rarely were the bodies of the dead returned home for a respectful burial. It is in this regard that relics from the Confederate prison camp gain importance. Not only did they give a concrete form to such unnamed bodies, but they also provided a sacred site for grief and devotion. Simultaneously, the artefacts helped those left behind, viz. women and children, in preparing for a case and testify to the war crimes. Among other issues, an important theme that this book touches upon relates to racial discrimination. Based on an in-depth analysis of the photo, Raab argues that as political reconciliation began, racial discrimination, especially concerning military sacrifice, became quite discernible. This racial discrimination, not surprisingly, paved the way for the marginalization of the Black soldiers and communities in America.

Jennifer Raab is Associate Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. Relics of War is her second book. Before this, she had authored Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail. Based on the works of one of the most celebrated artists of the 19th-century United States of America, Frederic Church (1826-1900), the book examines at length the aesthetics of detail that fundamentally shaped 19th-century American landscape painting. Given that Church lived during the era of the War, it would be interesting to study both the books in conjunction to understand the manner in which the Civil War shaped, not just Church’s works, but also American landscape painting in the 19th century. That, along with extensive field work, Raab has spent hours in archives scrutinizing the records about the War decades, which is well-reflected in Relics of War. The author has indeed done a commendable job in that she has been able to weave a fascinating account of the American Civil War through a study of just one picture depicting relics retrieved from the dreaded Confederate prison camp. Richly illustrated, Relics of War can successfully demonstrate how one photograph can capture a politically volatile moment in history, serving as witness, advocate, evidence, and memory, all at once.

Because the book has been written in a lucid manner and for more than one type of audience, it will be of interest to general readers, art historians, history enthusiasts, photographers, as well as specialists of American Civil War history.

Read More

More often than not I find myself thinking about people like Domenico Scandella, known as Mennochio, an Italian miller from the 16th century with a really wild understanding of the cosmos (please, if the whole microhistory interests you, read The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg). Or Eleno de Céspedes, a (probably) transmasc Afro-Spanish surgeon. Or the Women's March to Versailles in 1789. I simply care more about the lives of everyday people, I feel more connected to them, and I don't think you need to put certain figures in a pedestal to understand an era. I just want to ask a common Roman citizen about his day or an Olmec person if they prefer candy or butter popcorn.

When I study history I always think of Bertolt Bench's poem, A Worker Reads History:

Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?

The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers

I'm trying to trim down my tbr list(s) and I'm asking for your help! Descriptions and more info under the cut. Please reblog and add your thoughts!

(Hope it's okay that I answered publicly -- I think this might be one where the readership can be a resource, since I can't D: )

I'm afraid you've been led astray! My graduate thesis was for theatre, it was actually on masked performance in world cultures. I think you're thinking of my tumblr essay on canning, which unfortunately was just the result of being a super curious person who likes food and warned everyone ahead of time that he wouldn't be citing sources. I've often thought of doing that essay up as a book with historical sources and all, but the research is daunting (it involves a lot of quantitative measuring of non-quantitative stuff).

You can definitely do a doctorate in food history, but I'm afraid I don't know the best places to go to get one (much as I would LOVE TO myself). I would take a look at the authors of microhistories surrounding food -- "Cod" or "A History Of The World In Six Glasses" and similar -- and see where they went. Barring that, I'd look at doctoral programs where they have an explicit interest in fostering unusual research/study.

Permutations of Microhistory and Macrohistory

We can think of the “big” in “big history” in at least two senses. There is “big” in the sense of scale, so that big history is big in virtue of treating the entire history of the universe, from the big bang through the present and into the future, insofar as we can know the future. We can also express this idea by noting that the scale of time in big history is cosmological, or by saying that big history is diachronically comprehensive. Another sense of “big” is the sense of scope, or what we could also call comprehensiveness. In addition to being comprehensive as regards the scale of time, big history also can be comprehensive in the sense of drawing from every available source of knowledge.

Big history is already comprehensive in this way in virtue of its interdisciplinary approach: the knowledge of the special sciences is employed to give a complete historical picture of the universe—as complete as we can now make it, in any case. There will be always be ellipses and unresolved problems, and this is what makes research interesting: tracking down the missing connections, or whatever has disappeared from the historical record, and restoring it to its rightful place as part of our story.

The big historian need not refuse any perspective on history, least of all the perspective of microhistory—presumably the antithesis of big history—and the micro-historian’s jewel-like studies of particular times, places, communities, and even individuals, seen in all the detail of human experience as we know it in our own lives, and which we recognize in the lives of others, including others long dead or not yet born. That is to say, although big history and microhistory are apparently antithetical, they are not mutually exclusive or contradictory. Insofar as microhistory has been characterized as “large questions in small places” (as was said by Charles Joyner) the large questions of microhistory naturally align with the large questions of big history.

An entire big history could be assembled from a closely-woven tapestry of microhistorical studies, brought together and into relationship with each other through a larger framework that demonstrates the connections among these times, places, communities, and individuals. Indeed, one could argue that big history is entirely dependent upon such close studies, which form the ultimate constituents of the historical world that big history seeks to comprehend within its comprehensive scope and scale, and for which it furnishes the framework and the synthesis. Part of the comprehensiveness of big history is its ability to subsume within itself every possible microhistory: there is a place for everything, and everything can be put in its proper place, in big history.  

Esther Quaedackers’ concept of “little big histories” is entirely consonant both with the approach of microhistory and simultaneously with the approach of big history. This aspect of big history might be summarized as William Blake expressed himself in the opening lines of Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour

Art history, military history, environmental history, legal history, history of religion, etc. (all of which Hegel called the specialized forms of “reflective history” in the Introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History)—all find their place, or could potentially find their place, within the comprehensive framework of big history.

Perhaps more importantly, big history is comprehensive without being merely eclectic: it brings with it a particular perspective on history that gives a particular shape to all those historiographical traditions from which it draws, so that big history is itself history changed through its engagement with the special sciences, at the same time as the special sciences are changed, if they are changed at all, through their integration into a big history context.

We could formulate two alternative historical disciplines, one with the scale of big history, but which rejects on principle the scope of big history, and one with the scope of big history, but which rejects on principle the scale of big history. The former would be an overview of the totality of history, with no place for microhistorical interludes to fill in the concrete details of historical events; the latter would be a detailed synchronic history, bringing in the world entire, but comprising only a relatively short duration, and therefore diachronically incomplete.

These permutations of history imply yet another permutation: a history that rejects on principle both the scale and scope of big history. Thus the four permutations of scope and scale:

Synchronically limited, diachronically limited (traditional history)

Synchronically comprehensive, diachronically limited (microhistory)

Synchronically limited, diachronically comprehensive (scientific history)

Synchronically comprehensive, diachronically comprehensive (big history)

Once we have formulated these four permutations on the scope and scale of history, we can postulate yet another permutation that is the conjunction of all four permutations—a bigger big history, if you will. And if we make qualitative distinctions within the scope and scale of history, rather than merely quantitative distinctions, these permutations become both more complex and more interesting. Traditional history makes qualitative distinctions, since it has traditionally relied upon written sources and has been slow to recognize the reconstruction of history carried out by scientific history. There is a qualitative difference in evidence between the texts historians dig out of archives and the artifacts of material culture that archaeologists dig out of the ground. Both can be used to reconstruct past societies, and scientific history can reconstruct the history of societies that left no written records, therefore increasing the comprehensivity of history in an absolute sense.

I hope to eventually be able to show how the qualitative permutations of history suggest a range of histories, some more comprehensive while others less comprehensive, when we schematically differentiate evidence and methods.

Hello! I rarely get asks so this is new :)

Plagued and Peoples is on my tbr list, but I haven’t got to it yet. I will bump it up the list though. Thank you for the suggestion!

I read The Great Influenza by John M. Barry last month. It’s really good, but narrowly focused on America and the American military during the 1918 Flu. It felt a little too on point for right now; although, my local library is beefing up its collection of books on disease which pleases me. Another good book is The American Plague: the Untold Story of Yellow Fever by Mary Caldwell Crosby. She’s a very lyrical writer and yellow fever gets less attention in North American histories than it should.

For micro-histories, it depends a little on what interests you. I recently read The Mosquito: a Human History of Our Deadliest Predator by Timothy C. Winegard. It looks at turning points that were created, mostly by malaria.

I also recently read The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan. She traces the history of a landmark psychological study and its impact on psychiatry. It took some twists I was not expecting.

If you’re more interested in an event I always recommend Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson. It’s about the hurricane in 1900 and the history of the weather service. The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin is another good one for weather history and terrifying events.