The Microhistory of the Pacific Northwest

Birds Eye View of Seattle by E.S. Glover in 1878.  Photo courtesy of pauldorpat.com

Graduate students in history do not merely study history, or solely remember places, people and dates; instead, history graduate students and history professionals study new ways of perceiving and employing revisionist theory to their historical studies and research.  In Francesca Mari's The Microhistorian, the works of microhistorian Jill Lepore are discussed.  Lepore, after realizing that her post-undergraduate career was not going in the direction she wanted,  enrolled in graduate school where she approached history as many modern day social science students do, with the bottom-up methodology.  In this system, it is not the elite, powerful or famous that is analyzed, but in their place the everyday citizen of a community is interpreted as being the nucleus of historical events in which we research and try and understand.  In other words, in order to understand the impact of a war, the famous key players in history-war generals, political officials, allies, and nemeses offer little insight in the relationship and daily actions of those effected most by war, soldiers, their families and the community awaiting their return.  In addition, it is the small players that lend insight in the causes, influences and repercussions of war inflicted areas.  But how do historians gather material that will showcase the microhistorian argument?  

Kyvig and Marty in their collaborative Nearby History, suggest published documents as primary resources, but are very keen to push unpublished documents as well.  These unpublished documents can be found in two places: archives and personal manuscript collections.  Archives hold an abundance of information such as births, marriages and deaths certificates, but also tax records, employment records and health records, though many of these records are federally protected for everyone as to safeguard privacy.

Many noted historians utilize these unpublished documents in order to gather a greater breadth of understanding their research topics.  In Ruth Barnes Moynihan’s Let Women Vote: Abigail Scott Duniway in Washington Territory, the endeavors of Abigail Scott are meticulously communicated through the utilization of diaries and letters, obtained through personal collections.  The same can be said of Wayne D. Rasmussen’s A Century of Farming in the Inland Empire and Carlos A. Schwantes’ Spokane and the Wageworkers’ Frontier:  A Labor History to World War I.     All of these stories, manifested from unpublished and published traces, depict the lives of ordinary citizens, from labor union organizers, agricultural workers, suffrage proponents and opponents, lending much insight in the workings of the fight for women’s voting rights, a hundred years of agricultural history and labor history.

Thrush continues our anecdotal accounts applying microhistory as a framework for understanding local histories, particularly in the case of Seattle.  Thrush details the stories of indigenous people being dispossessed from their native lands, unable to compete with the urban sprawl, ending in disaster for the Native people who tried to live in traditional ways.  These and similar detailed accounts are widely taught throughout elementary and secondary education in the United States.  However, Thrush also describes other Indians engaging in migrating patterns to the Puget Sound area.  The Seattle area was growing and diversifying in many ways, “Nowhere is this clearer than in the record of all but the most invisible lives: the federal census (69).”  Studying the microhistory of Seattle in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries allows us to understand the actual occurrences within that local population and in turn, the political and social climate of the period; this process can be applied to any community in any time and place. 

Microhistory, as a relatively new and emerging approach to studying history, allows historians, both graduate students and professionals, to better understand the circumstances of past events and better suit our understanding of how they are effecting us today, as well as how to avoid adverse costs from current parallel circumstances.