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REVIEW ESSAYS

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MICROHISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

1'HEHISTORY OFEVERYDAY LIFE. RECONSTRUCTING HISTORICAL EXPERIENCES ND A WAYSOF LIFE. Edited by Alf Ldtke, translated by William Templer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. pp. xiii, 315. JEUXO'ECHELLES. MICRO-ANALYSEL'EXPERIENCE. LA A Edited by Jacques Revel. Paris: Gallimard le Seuil, 1996. pp. 243. When we examine something in great detail and at elose range, do we understand I it better? It depends on what we want to know: if examined too elosely, the blotches of blended pigment in a painting obscure its coherence as a work of art. Still, broshstrokes enlighten us about the artist's technique. Viewing a frog's skin, cells through a microscope reveals their physiology, but suggests nothing of the frog's place in its ecosystem. Does our understanding of the past work the same way? The issue is raised by two recent historiographical approaches that ron parallel to each other and in certain respects overlap, German Alltagsgeschichte and ltalian microstoria. They are represented in two collections of essays, the first an English translation of eight artieles originally published in German in 1989, the second, ten artieles by Italian and French historians and anthropologists who participated in a seminar at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in 1991. These two volumes provide an occasion to reftect on the contributions and limits of Alltagsgeschichte and microstoria. It would seem that there are political as weIl as epistemological reasons for the reduction of historical scale in both the history of everyday life and microhistory. This turn reftects a shift in the perspective of many leftist social historians in the past two decades, whether neo-Marxist or Annaliste, in their desire for a new sort of usable past. Beginning in the 1970s, faith in the possibility of the liberation of the mass of marginalized humanity through the transformation (or deeline) of industrial capitalism became increasingly untenable. The protean interplay of political institutions, corporate power, technological innovation, and mass advertising in the industrialized world seemed rather to militate against any deliverance of the downtrodden. What are the implications for social history if long-term, large-scale processes imprison rather than liberate? If anything, the

unopposed growth of global, information-age capitalism has made this question more urgent since 1989. Enter the micro-scale: by dramatically shrinking the arena of investigation, the practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte and microstoria questioned the purported teleology of modernizing historical processes. Their diverse, detailed results suggest that developments such as industrialization and bureaucratization should be rethought as contingent and uneven. At the same time, meticulous attention to human interaction on the micro-scale preserves the agency of ordinary people. Reversing the views of social historians who saw teleology "on their side," this vision suggests hope for an undetermined future insofar as it finds contingency in the past. The editor of The History of Everyday Life, Alf Ldtke, outlines several characteristic features of recent Alltagsgeschichte in his introductory essay to the volurne, entitled "What is the History of Everyday Life and Who are Its Practitioners?" Taken together, these traits reftect the desire for a politically satisfying past. First, much like the more general concern with "history from below," the study of everyday life focuses on the qualitative experience of ordinary people, "the life and survival of those who have remained largely anonymous in history-the 'nameless' multitudes in their workaday trials and tribulations" (4). Second, the approach conceives broad processes as the products of dynamic practices to which ordinary people contributed, rather than as impersonal structures or forces imposed by an abstract state or market (6-7). Thus Harald Dehne, in his essay on male workers' experiences in the former German Democratic Republic, distinguishes the notion of Alltag from the Marxist concept of Lebensweise, the former analyzing the concrete behavior of individuals in its "empirical multiplicity" rather than as the product of large-scale, iron-lawgoverned processes (121-125). Third, this perspective from below stresses the costs of so-called progress, rationalization, and emancipation in the modern period, a point related to the overt political aim of the history of everyday life, "to awaken a feeling of Betroffenheit, personal emotional concern" for the oppressed and marginalized (7-8, 23). Rejecting Marxist views of the historical process highlights the agency of ordinary ~ople. At the same time, retaining Marxist sensibilities affords historians of everyday life a critique of liberal conceptions of modernity. Historians of everyday life seek to evoke historical empathy without sacrificing historical otherness. Using tools derived from cultural and social anthropology, they endeavor to reconstruct and explain the reciprocal relationship between individual actions and experiences on the one hand, and material life, institutions, and processes on the other. Thus in his essay about the relevance of cultural anthropology for Alltagsgeschichte, Hans Medick notes "the culturally shaped context for action and interpretation" that is always "decisively inftuenced and molded by materially objective living conditions and changes in those conditions" (54). Finally, "[t]he history of everyday life concentrates on small units," although not, according to Ldtke, as a mere arbitrary preference. Instead, capturing the lived experience of individuals within dense, complex networks of

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social and political relations questions unitary interpretations rooted in 10ng-term historical developments (15-16). In his article, "Popular Culture and Workers' Culture as Symbolic Orders," Wolfgang Kaschuba underlines the importance of relating micro-contextual phenomena such as workers' comportment to macro-historical processes: "such an approach does not entail any abandonment of the 'big questions ' regarding the formation of states and classes, religions and churches, industrialization and capitalism, nation and revolution, the basic causes and consequences of National Socialism" (170). Rather, one discovers the agency of ordinary people in the arena of "everyday life," which, when examined in detail, forces a rethinking of major historical developments and reveals them to be contingent. The microscale acts as a solvent on the alleged trajectory of macro-developments. Such a research agenda, then, links scale, possibility, agency, and the desire for a usable past. Ldtke eschews the term "total history" (21), presumably because of its Braudelian connotations of deterministic structures and homogeneous perspective. However, one might call Alltagsgeschichte an attempt at "integral history": an endeavor that seeks to identify and integrate everything-all relevant material, social, political, and cultural data-that permits the fullest possible reconstruction of ordinary life experiences in all their varied complexity, as they are formed and transformed. Only a tremendous constriction of sc ale makes this enterprise conceivable. Indeed, Dorothee Wierling, who explores the relatively underexploited interface between the history of everyday life and gender history, directly states that "alltagsgeschichte is microhistory" (157). Here the history of everyday life is close cousin to ltalian microhistory, particularly in the form predominant in the volume edited by Jacques Revel. Despite the diversity of microhistory in practice, it seems useful to introduce a basic distinction between episodic and systematic microhistory. The first is epitomized by Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms (1976),and proceeds by relentless scrutiny of a specific encounter or a seemingly minor "episode" in order to illuminate aspects of a past society and culture that resist disclosure through more conventional historical methods.1 Thus Ginzburgand other practitioners of episodic microhistory have used inquisitorial records to explore the relationship between elite and popular culture, for example, in early modem Europe. Systematic microhistory, on the other hand, is a new way of doing social history. The benchmark work is Giovanni Levi's Inheriting Power: The Story 0/ an Exorcist (1985), a study referred to by virtually every contributor to the Revel collection. This approach entails the painstaking reconstruction of individual and familial social relationships in a necessarily restricted geographical setting, based on sufficiently deilse archival sources such as notarial records, parish registers, and wills.2 Systematic social history at the level of lived human interac1. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese anti the Wonns: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, transl. lohn and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980). 2. Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist, transl. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago and London, 1988).

tions compels one to do microhistory, as does the goal of understanding "all of life" (Dehne, 125) as experienced by ordinary people. It is this systematic microhistory as social history that engages the contributors to the Revel collection. Seen in terms of its guiding orientations, systematic microhistory shares more with Alltagsgeschichte than its microscopic field of investigation. There is a simHar critique of deterministic structures and long-term processes as too distant from the dynamics of human interaction to be convincing explanations of historical change. In the French context, this amounts to a deliberate repudiation of the Annales tradition in its classic, quantifying mode, as several contributors to the Revel collection acknowledge. The emphasis is on moments in the exchange, reinforcement, and transformation of norms and relationships among small populations. Gone are Braudel's longue duree structures that determine individual destinies. Instead, systematic microhistorians affirm the human agency of past men and women at every level of society, but always within a specific, concrete network of social relationships. Cultural and social anthropology provide the basic conceptual tools for this endeavor, constituting another affinity with the history of everyday life. At the same time, systematic microhistorians reject both structuralist and functionalist anthropology as ahistorical and insufficiently dynamic for the task, a point that both Alban Bensa and Marc AMles make in their respective articles about the relationship of anthropology to microhistory. Instead, as Paul-Andre Rosental shows with admirable clarity in his article, "Construire le 'macro' par le 'micro': Fredrik Barth et la microstoria," Levi and others have drawn above all on the social interactionist anthropology of the Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth. To simplify radically: beginning from a precise and complete delineation of all observable social behaviors in a given context of competition or conftict at the level of individual interactions, one seeks a "generative model" capable of accounting for the processes that produced every manifestation. In principle, this overcomes the problem of statistically majority and minority social behaviors inevitably encountered by macrotheories, because an adequate generative model can explain every instance. Revel himself refers to "a total history, but this time built from the ground up" (21).3 The foundation of the enterprise is a painstaking empiricism at the microlevel, from which one reconstructs the familial and extra- familial relationships of a community, and as far as possible, infers the behavioral patterns and cultural values embedded in them. Despite their affinities, Alltagsgeschichte and systematic microhistory are not interchangeable historical enterprises. Perhaps the clearest difference, to judge from these two collections of essays, is the more eclectic, diffuse character of the history of everyday life as compared to the stronger theoretical center that Barth's anthropology provides for systematic microhistory. Correlatively, systematic microhistory is less obviously driven by political commitments than is Alltagsgeschichte, even if its social history also suggests a usable past. The fundamental focus of the research, too, is somewhat different: historians of every3. All translations from the French are mine.

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day life seek above all to recapture the lived experiences of ordinary men and women, situated in concrete webs of social relations, whereas systematic microhistorians strive first and foremost to reconstruct the social relationships themselves as the basis for explaining historical change. In part this might derive from certain differences in sources, related to the primary historical period on which the practitioners of each approach have concentrated. Some historians of everyday life (for example, Medick) work on early modern Europe, and certain systematic microhistorians (such as Maurizio Gribaudi) work on the modern period. But most everyday life historians have done twentieth-century history, often employing oral interviews as an important part of their source material, while most systematic microhistorians have concentrated on early modern Europe, for whom such sources are obviously not an option. Twentieth-century historians of everyday life can therefore more readily reconstruct a denser, more intimate texture of experience using oral interviews, photographs, and self-generated sources than can microhistorians working from early modern sources. (For the latter, to infer complex familial strategies of land acquisition from surviving notarial records, for example, as in Levi's study of the Piedmontese village of Santena, is already a significant achievement.) The contention of, and justification for, both Alltagsgeschichte and microhistory is that a;sufficiently close, detailed examination of a very restricted subject of research calls into question conventional, long-term views of historical development and associated conceptualizations of change. The concentration on the level of individual human interactions distinguishes these enterprises from case studies based on macro-causal paradigms. Thus neither the history of everyday life nor microhistory aspire to be simply ordinary history writ small-not every case study or local study is ipsofacto a microhistory. Consequently, neither aims to be simply accretionist, to offer so many "building blocks" in the edifice of a larger, only more detailed, historical picture. This is particularly the case for those scholars of the micro-scale closest to Barth, such as Gribaudi, Rosental, and Cerutti, as weIl as Levi himself. Essentially, they imply that the level of concrete, individual interactions is the "really real" in the historical process, reversing the Braudelian primacy of long-term, impersonal forces and structures. Gribaudi, for example, states that microanalytical attention paid to precise contexts entails the effective abandonment of causal concepts associated with macrostructural developments (120). Thus the meaning of a given institution or of the market, for example, "is given in the interaction and in the negotiation of the concrete social actors who, in each instance, embody them" (121). For Rosental, a "multiscopic" approach regards microanalysis as one among several scales of historical investigation (a view espoused by Revel and Bernard Lepetit in their contributions to leux d'echelles), each of which discloses a distinctive kind of historical knowledge and none of which is more fundamental than the others. In contrast, Rosental's own microhistorical approach maintains that individual interactions on the level of empirical social causality comprise the level that "produces the social forms that are observed" (142).

This is the strongest and potentially the most important claim about doing historical research made in the two collections. If true, it means that the sources of historical change should not be sought in large-scale institutions (the state), structures (class), or mechanisms (the market) as such, because they do not exist there. These macro-phenomena are abstractions, real only insofar as they are expressed in the dynamic flux of the myriad, concrete, human transactions that both produce and, differentially and unpredictably, transform them over time. Here the open-ended dynamism seen by systematic microhistory links arms with the contingent heterogeneity emphasized by the history of everyday life. Sharply reducing historical scale disrupts both the corporate character and the temporal continuity of institutions and structures. The contributions of both the history of everyday life and microhistory are substantial. On one level, they comprise critical approaches that challenge historical syntheses and long-term narratives. In his article in leux d'echelles, Levi draws on detailed expenditure books from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venetian families to dispute the notion of a sharp break between pre- and postindustrial consumerism. A top-down, diffusionist narrative of consumer behavior cannot account for the complexities of consumption and credit practices in early modern Europe throughout the social hierarchy. Similarly, Lutz Niethammer makes impressive use of oral interviews to challenge simplistic interpretations of societal cohesion in the former East Germany in the decades after World War ll. Yet viewed only insofar as they correct historical generalizations, the logic of such contributions, which use a carefully researched counter-example to show the insufficiency of a received interpretation, is no different than that of more traditional case studies. While always important as a safeguard against inaccurateand in certain circumstances, overtly ideological and even politically dangerous-generalizations about the past, the logic of corrective counterexample is unique neither to the history of everyday life nor to microhistory. Microhistory and Alltagsgeschichte are distinctive rather for their substantive contribution to our historical knowledge and their conceptualization of historical processes. Here one can only applaud the insistence on individual human agency, coupled with the concern to specify how it is historically circumscribed for different individuals and groups. Fundamentally, this seeks to avoid both the Scylla of blind historical forces that determine individual behaviors, and the Charybdis of a romanticized self-determination by radically free historical actors. The strong empiricism of systematic microhistory in particular-Rosental speaks of a "neo-positivism" (159)-is a welcome corrective to any study of "representations" divorced from their concrete milieux of origin, reception, and transformation.4 The interesting issues raised by the "linguistic turn" concern not the purported autonomy of representations severed from a dubiously problematized
4. Here there is considerable overlap with recent French scholarship on the sodal history of concrete practices. See the collection of essays in /.es formes de l' experience: Une autre histoire sodale, ed. Bemard Lepetit (Paris, 1995). Four of the contributors to leux d'echelles-Lepetit, Revel, Cerutti, and Gribaudi-also have articles in this collection.

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"real world" (with the obligatory, ironie quotation marks, of course), but rather the relationship between representations and their referents. Neither language nor texts are merely self-referential, and in order to assess the nature of their referentiality in specific instances, one's analytical approach must examine the connection between words and the world. In addition, by focusing on the concrete and particular, microhistorical approaches often successfully evoke a vivid sense of lived human experience, without which even the most sophisticated analysis becomes abstract and remote. This is a great strength of episodie microhistory in particular, and of the sensitivity to the biographical dimension of individuallives in Alltagsgeschichte, a point made by Sabina Loriga in her contribution to leux

d'echelles.
Yet shrinking the historical scale in order to investigate the past in all its dynamic complexity also exacts a price. It would be amistake to overlook the value of microhistorical investigation, but it would also be amistake to ignore its limitations. Our historical understanding might be more complete and more nuanced at close range, but it is confined in other ways that derive from the methods employed, the sources available, and the restricted scale of the enterprise. We may rightly doubt whether a Barthian model could account, in practice, for all human actions and decisions to which we might apply it, and still retain utility as an eXJ?lanatory model. It is useful for answering certain kinds of questions-for example, about the relationship of families to land and inheritance in the fairly homogeneous village of Santena in the late seventeenth century. It seems much less promising for answering other questions, such as those that address religious affiliation and the character of religious commitment in sixteenth-century Europe, for example, which often divided families and other social groups. It seems unlikely that microhistorical analysis will eventually demonstrate, on the basis of hitherto unperceived, fine-grained social relationships and interactions, what social-historical analyses have thus far failed to show: why, for example, particular peasants in south and central German villages became Anabaptists while others did not, or similarly, why some middling lawyers but not others tumed Calvinist in French towns in the 1550s and 1560s. I very much doubt that it might also explain, based on identifiable factors, why specific converts occupied their respective niches on the spectrum of commitment from the most to the least devout. This leaves aside the even more difficult question of shifting degrees of engagement over time. It is a tall order indeed to have one's "generative model" account for everything from enthusiastic embrace of traditional behaviors and beliefs, through shoulder-shrugging indifference to them, to their violent repudiation, across the social spectrum and with explanatory power at the level of individuals. Conversely, insofar as any approach could be made to explain such a wide range of divergent behaviors, its explanatory power would presumably diminish to the extent that its variables remained complex and open-ended. Gribaudi asserts that social interactions in Barth's paradigm in principle account for every cultural and political expression on a spectrum (123), but this must be qualified if there are phenomena that the model can-

not explain. It should be noted, however, that this observation restriets the applicability of Barth's insights rather than undermining them altogether. The most enthusiastic proponents of systematic microhistory as social history tend to exaggerate its reach. Reconstructing social networks, from which one can infer familial and individual strategies, teIls us something new and valuable about ordinary people in early modem Europe. A further question, however, is how much of the experience of the menu peuple-in its most inclusive sensewas directly related to, and shaped by, these strategies and the concerns that informed them. How much about the choices, worldviews, and lived experience of individuallives can historians reconstruct based on notarial documents, parish registers, wills, and similar sourees? In those unusual instances where we possess detailed, self-generated sources from pre-industrial artisans-such as the seventeenth-century tanner of Barcelona, Miquel Parets, or the Puritan joiner of London, Nehemiah Wallington-it is apparent that their lives were far more complex and multifaceted than one would ever know without their journals.5 Serial archival documents could not provide the same detail, nuance, or sense of life lived in the seventeenth century. It follows that one ought to be cautious indeed about claims to reconstruct "experience" on the basis of demographie, financial, and familial records. There is every reason to think that such sources reftect only dimly a partial aspect of the lives of which they are scant traces. Here it would seem that the history of everyday life has important ramifications for systematic microhistory: the oral interviews used by Niethammer, for example, in order to understand family cohesion in East ~rmany after World War n, reftect a closeness to experience that should caution social historians working fundamentally from archival documents. In keeping with the empirical rigor of systematic microhistory, the nature of one's sources dictates (often frustrating) limits about how much, and what aspects, of lived human experience historians might reasonably hope to reconstruct. To recapture the subjective, qualitative experiences of past men and women in their own terms is one thing; to explain them with theoretical tools derived from cultural and social anthropology, or indeed any of the social sciences, is quite another. These two endeavors stand in potentially greater tension to one another than is explored by any of their protagonists in the Ldtke volume. Medick hints at this issue near the end of his article: "The recognition of what is 'alien' and 'other,' even when guided by concepts such as 'strategy' and 'habitus,' still runs the risk of being misunderstood in terms of a model ultimately derived from the conception of Western individualism" (61). Depending on what one wants to investigate, the difficulties can cut more deeply. The implicit secularism and tacit atheism of the modem social sciences in general are inherently problematic if, for example, one wants to recapture the religious experience of men and women in the past. One can describe and understand "having faith," for example,
5. A Journal ofthe Plague Year: The Diary ofthe Barcelona Tanner Miquel Parets 1651, ed. and trans!. James S. Amelang (New York and Oxford, 1991); Paul S. Seaver, Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (Stanford, 1985).

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depending on one's sources; or one can attempt to explain it with reference to secular-psychological categories. But one cannot explain and claim still to be understanding past people on their own terms, because in opting for explanation, it is precisely their terms-and experiences-that one explains in other categories. What has been insufficiently appreciated is that in the history of religion, these two endeavors are not merely different, but incompatible. Microhistory and Alltagsgeschichte face this problem not because of their micro-scales of inquiry, but insofar as both seek to recapture lived human experience and to explain it in social-scientific terms. Since its beginnings in the 1970s, microhistory has been dogged by questions about how representative or typical are the cases it investigates. These questions apply particularly to episodic microhistory and to Edoardo Grendi's notion ofthe "normal exception" with which it is associated. Systematic microhistory, however, displaces rather than avoids the issue. In Inheriting Power, for example, Levi's implicit confidence that Santena can stand for "everyvillage," as it were, in the region around Turin, is necessarily dependent on a wider, comparative context of knowledge. Otherwise it would make no sense to characterize Santena as "a banal place" and his account as "an undistinguished story" that is "so very ordinary."6 It is precisely here, as critics of microhistory have often pointed out, that the approach bares its Achilles heel. How do the inheritance patterns and family strategies in village A compare to those in village B? How about to village C in a different region, or a different country, at the same time? To be consistent with thetr own empiricism, systematic microhistorians must recognize the restricted character of their work. One could simply eschew a wider context altogether, but this would contradict the desire to investigate broader processes "on the ground." If a particular village is to tell us about something more than itselfand systematic microhistorians certainly intend that it do s<r-then one must presuppose, know, or expect something about larger patterns. Yet if it is true, following Barth, that the springs of historical transformation are embedded in individual interactions, then creating a broader picture based on microhistorical studies would make the traditional problem of relating local studies to large-scale phenomena pale by comparison. Related to this dilemma is the problem of how one might apply a Barthian model to a social reality larger and more complex than a village, such as a town with several thousand people rather than a few hundred, to say nothing of a major city. The Wrttemberg village of Neckarhausen is one' thing; what about Nuremberg or Berlin?7 Cerutti's solution to this problem in her work on Turin prompts questions about the representativeness of the specific neighborhoods, corporations, and confraternities on which she relies at crucial points in her argument (178, 181, 182). Yet if one takes seriously the methodology of systematic microhistory, how could it be otherwise? To study large communities in the man6. Levi, Inheriting Power, xvi. 7. For Neckarhausen, see David Warren Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge, Eng., 1990).

ner in which Levi studied Santena, or David Sabean analyzed Neckarhausen, would seem to be impossible, not only due to the quantity of source material involved, but also because of the more complex and diverse social interactions characteristic of urban settings. To make this point is less to criticize systematic microhistory than it is to recognize another of its limitations. Finally we must return to the issue of scale and the reconceptualization of long-term, large-scale phenomena suggested by the history of everyday life and microhistory. Historians continue to ask questions about geographical regions larger than villages, processes that cover decades or centuries, and institutions whose reality it would seem strange to analyze in strictly microhistorical terms. Consider the modem nation-state. It is entirely appropriate, and enhances our knowledge of the past, to take a particular institution within it-say, federal judicial courts-and to show, in a specific instance, how its implementation at the micro-Ievel was an uneven process of interaction among many different individuals, that its outcome was not predetermined, and that experience of the process varied tremendously depending on one's social and politicallocation. Here the small is intended to illuminate the large. Depending on the content of generalizations about the courts' spread, however, such an example neither necessarily falsifies nor undermines them. Nor, more importantly, does it obviate the particular character of the courts or the state as institutions , beyond their multifarious, specific incamations at a given moment in time. Indeed, it is possible that the micro-scale highlighting of individual agency, and its concomitant questioning of the teleology of long-term processes, exaggerates both the fragility of large institutions and the contingency of their development. We might conclude, on the basis of microhistorical investigation, that the state' s development and extension was a halting, contested affair, the unprogrammed result of countless, individual social interactions at the local level. But its present institutional power is not thereby diminished. We should not therefore infer that the state is really weaker than it seems, but rather that microhistorical approaches cannot adequately account for its power--even if they rightly note the contingency of each of the innumerable encounters that produced and continue to sustain it. In other words, microhistorical analysis alone can be inadequate and misleading: closer and more detailed is not invariably better in terms of accuracy or explanatory power. The cartographic analogy works well in this case: it is amis"" take to hand someone an architectural blueprint if he or she wants to drive to another city. The key is knowing which map we need in a particular instance, and how to combine harmoniously maps of different scales. One wonders whether, at some level, there is in microhistory and the history of everyday life a degree of wishful overemphasis on the contingency of industrial and information-age capitalism over the long haul, and the processes of state-building, bureaucratization, and technological proliferation associated with them. In his recent planet's-eye view of the "short twentieth century," Eric Hobsbawm, who throughout his scholarly career has explored the long-term developments that have shaped the modem world, takes a rather different view from that of historians of the micro-

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scale: "We know that behind the opaque cloud of our ignorance and the uncertainty of detailed outcomes , the historical forces that shaped the century, are continuing to perate."8 Even if microhistory disclosed these "detailed outcomes" with analytical precision, would it diminish their aggregate impact? The most usable past and the most hopeful future may be the ones closest to lived individual experiences.
BRAD

S.

GREGORY

Stanford University

8. Erie Hobsbawm, 584. My emphasis.

The Age of Extremes: A History ofthe World, 1914-1991

(New York, 1994),