Micro history is a branch of the study of history First developed in the 1970s, micro history is the study of the past on a very small scale.
The most common type of micro history is the study of a small town or village. Other common studies include looking at individuals of minor importance, or analyzing a single painting. Micro history is an important component of the “new history” that has emerged since the 1960s. It is usually done in close collaboration with the social sciences, such as anthropology and sociology.
Micro history is to be distinguished from local history, in which research is not seen as a case study for more general historical trends, but is appreciated for its inherent interest to the local community. Micro history – differs from these two in many significant respects. Although it focuses on the locality and the ordinary people, it has nothing traditional about it. It is a late modern reaction to micro history focused on the small units, individuals and groups.
The micro historians felt that it was only at this micro level that it was possible to know the reality. Micro historians should not be viewed as a monolithic bloc even in Italy Micro history has a curious relationship with local history and oral history. It resembles local history as its subject matter is often confined to a locality. Moreover, its sources are local in origins and nature.
The oral sources, folk tales and legends and local records, which are staple of local history, are also used extensively by the micro historians. But the resemblance ends here. M.M. Posta once distinguished the difference between the ‘microscopic’ and the microcosmic’ studies.
‘Microscopic’ studies are those which remain confined to issues of local interests and significance, whereas ‘microcosmic’ studies are based on an intensive research of small area located within a larger context. In this perspective, while a large part of local history belongs to the ‘microscopic’ studies, the micro history almost entirely belongs of the ‘microcosmic’ variety.
There are wide differences between them. On the one hand, there is Levi who is theoretically much closer to the analytical history and believes that history is a social science, and not a work of art. On the other hand, Gianna Pomata believes that there is ‘a dazzling prospect of a history that would be thoroughly up to the most rigorous standards of the craft while also matching, in terms of vitality and intensity of vision, the work of art’.
Carlo Ginzburg stands somewhere in the middle. On the whole, it may be said, as Georg G. Iggers points out, that micro history ‘has never been able to escape the framework of larger structures and transformations in which history takes place’. It can be said in defence of the micro historians that it is a conscious choice and not some theoretical slip. Most of them have chosen to criticize the methodology of macro history; but, at the same time, they have thoroughly rejected the relativism associated with the linguistic turn, postmodernism, and cultural relativism.