Francesca Mari zooms in on it:
Microhistory arose largely in Europe and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s in reaction not only to the top-down historical narratives common to political history but also to the increasingly quantitative ones of social history. Microhistorians argued that the generalizations of capital “H” Great Man History distorted the truth of how most individuals actually lower-case lived and therefore advocated telling the stories of what one practitioner called “the normal exception”: the interesting small player who could stand in for the average person and, as a result, offer a unique angle overlooked by elite texts and master narratives. Although at first a European phenomenon—perhaps best exemplified by Carlo Ginzburg’s 1976 The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller—microhistory also found its advocates on this side of the Atlantic: Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, for example, and Laurel Ulrich’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812.
Mari focuses on the work of Jill Lepore:
Although one of her essays shows how a biography won Andrew Jackson the presidency and set a presidential precedent, another shows how Thomas Paine, who motivated the American Revolution with his pamphlet Common Sense, died alone in Greenwich Village shortly after being turned away from the poll booth, his nails curled over his toes like claws. Perhaps such instructives are why Lepore doesn’t primarily write for writing’s sake in the form of finely-crafted fiction. She writes to redeem a set of truths about the past for consumption by the normal exception, an audience of ordinary lives, readers who want history that sounds like them: “Who tells the story,” Lepore says in her preface to The Story of America, “like who writes the laws and who wages the wars, is always part of that struggle”—a struggle over who’s included and who’s excluded, which is to say, over who is empowered.
The Dish 