Results by title
3 books match the query 'Microhistory'
Jewish Childhood in Kraków
A Microhistory of the HolocaustJoanna Sliwa
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Jewish Childhood in Kraków is the first book to tell the history of Kraków in the second World War through the lens of Jewish children’s experiences. Here, children assume center stage as historical actors whose recollections and experiences deserve to be told, analyzed, and treated seriously.
Sliwa scours archives to tell their story, gleaning evidence from the records of the German authorities, Polish neighbors, Jewish community and family, and the children themselves to explore the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland and in Kraków in particular. A microhistory of a place, a people, and daily life, this book plumbs the decisions and behaviors of ordinary people in extraordinary times.
Offering a window onto human relations and ethnic tensions in times of rampant violence, Jewish Childhood in Kraków is an effort both to understand the past and to reflect on the position of young people during humanitarian crises.
Microhistories of Composition
Bruce Mccomiskey
Utah State University Press, 2016
Writing studies has been dominated throughout its history by grand narratives of the discipline, but in this volume Bruce McComiskey begins to explore microhistory as a way to understand, enrich, and complicate how the field relates to its past. Microhistory investigates the dialectical interaction of social history and cultural history, enabling historians to examine uncommon sites, objects, and agents of historical significance overlooked by social history and restricted to local effects by cultural history. This approach to historical scholarship is ideally suited for exploring the complexities of a discipline like composition.
Through an introduction and eleven chapters, McComiskey and his contributors—including major figures in the historical research of writing studies, such as Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Kelly Ritter, and Neal Lerner—develop focused narratives of particular significant moments or themes in disciplinary history. They introduce microhistorical methodologies and illustrate their application and value for composition historians, contributing to the complexity and adding momentum to the emerging trend within writing studies toward a richer reading of the field’s past and future. Scholars and historians of both composition and rhetoric will appreciate the fresh perspectives on institutional and disciplinary histories and larger issues of rhetorical agency and engagement enacted in writing classrooms that are found in Microhistories of Composition.
Other contributors include Cheryl E. Ball, Suzanne Bordelon, Jacob Craig, Matt Davis, Douglas Eyman, Brian Gogan, David Gold, Christine Martorana, Bruce McComiskey, Josh Mehler, Annie S. Mendenhall, Kendra Mitchell, Antony N. Ricks, David Stock, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Bret Zawilski, and James T. Zebroski.
St. Augustine's Bones
A MicrohistoryHarold Samuel Stone
University of Massachusetts Press, 2002
In 1695, workers in Pavia, Italy, chanced upon a collection of bones in the crypt of the Cathedral of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro. The workers later testified that they had seen the name of St. Augustine written in charcoal on the surface of the casket they had uncovered. Yet by the time of the official inquest, all traces of the writing had disappeared.
Rich with new insights into urban literacy and conceptions of reading, this book explores the controversy that ensued over the alleged discovery of Augustine's bones. Manuscripts, broadsides, pamphlets—even whole books—were devoted to proving or disproving the authenticity of the remains. Although these works were addressed to members of the clergy, they were also intended for the general reading public in Pavia, Milan, and Venice. Their dissemination helped create a temporary public sphere in which the merits of the case were examined in a spirit of free debate.
A reexamination of the dispute over St. Augustine's bones illuminates aspects of Catholic spirituality in Northern Italy during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It also reveals the different ways in which Catholic scholars, local religious leaders, and the papal administration sought to influence and direct local popular religious belief and practices. Although the controversy was officially resolved by the papacy in 1728, the debate over the relics of San Pietro continued into the twentieth century.
By combining methods developed in the burgeoning field of the history of the book with the tools of cultural analysis, Harold Samuel Stone not only recovers the stories surrounding St. Augustine's bones, but also reconstructs the mental world of those who read or heard them.