Recentering the Subaltern: Microhistory as Method

HUM:Global Talk! with Sue Peabody.

The genre of microhistory is older than a half century, beginning with the bestsellers by Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Robert Darnton, but today many historians are returning to this narrative structure to tell biographical stories in a global frame. Is every biography a microhistory? What can microhistory do that Big History cannot?

Based on studies of enslaved and free people in France’s age of revolution and abolition, Sue Peabody analyzes how centering historical inquiry on the lives of specific subaltern people forces historians to ask new questions of the imperial archive to generate new understandings of more traditional Big History narratives.

Bio

Sue Peabody, Ph.D., is Meyer Distinguished Professor of History and Liberal Arts at Washington State University Vancouver, and author of numerous books and articles on slavery, race and the law in France and its colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her books and articles have shaped the field of French history over the last quarter century.