FHI HUMANITIES FUTURES
MICRO MEETS MACRO:
THE CHALLENGE OF SCALE IN HISTORY
Stories, Experience, and Multi-Scalar Perspectives in
Writing History Today
Keynote Address:
Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon
Professor of Cultural History
University of Iceland
TUESDAY, APRIL 11th
1:00 – 5:30
SMITH WAREHOUSE BAY 4, C105
AHMADIEH FAMILY LECTURE HALL
Session I
Keynote Address
Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon
"Work, Love, Death, Grief, and Education in the 19th Century:
A Microhistorical Perspective on the Use of Ego Documents"
Moderator: Tom Robisheaux (Microhistory)
Session II
Playing the "Ladder Game":
Writing History with Multi-Scalar Perspectives
Moderator: Tom Robisheaux (Microhistory)
Participants: Michelle Lanier (Director, NC African American Heritage Commission and the Traditions and Heritage Program, NC Arts Council), Mustafa Tuna (Russian and Central Eurasian History and Culture), Rochelle Rojas (Iberian History)
This final symposium in the series, "Micro Meets Macro: The Challenge of Scale in History," explores the challenge of using stories and first-hand accounts to understand how historical actors themselves experience different scales of time, space, culture and institutions. Since the advent of microhistory, the emergence of global history, and the challenges of Big Data and Big History, historians are imagining new ways of understanding the past with ever more complex scaling of historical studies. What scale of analysis is the best for solving a particular problem of historical understanding? Do we need new approaches to writing history at the national or regional level? New approaches to time are also changing the craft of history. What difference does it make to write about long periods of time or, conversing, reducing a timeframe to focus on very short periods of time? The questions about scale involve understanding experience, social and political action, writing historical biography, and using social network analysis and quantitative methods. Today, when many historians are seeking to incorporate large scale global perspectives into their work, understanding the smaller scales on which people actually experience their lives provokes new and rigorous consideration of historical sources and evidence as well. Can one write global microhistory? What concepts can historians use to capture the different experiences of scale? Our keynote speaker, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, co-author with István Szjártó of What is Microhistory, brings his expertise as a micro- and global historian to bear on the challenge of sale. In our final session, we explore Duke historians’ solutions to the problem of scale and reflect on the issues of scale raised in the Micro Meets Macro Series as a whole. The public, scholars and graduate students from all fields of the humanities and interpretive social sciences are welcome. This event is presented by the Department of History and the Humanities Futures initiative at the Franklin Humanities Institute.
