Case study, microhistory, small history?

In the era of the global turn, when many scholars are seeking to investigate problems on a larger scale than ever before, and of digitalised resources, which enable scholars to potentially work with unprecedented quantities of source materials, we might expect to see the triumph of ‘big’ history. Indeed, some scholars have advocated ‘distant reading’ of a huge corpus of sources, and for the use of computational methods to move beyond what can otherwise easily appear to be ‘anec-data’ (Fridlund, Oiva and Paju Reference Fridlund, Oiva and Paju2020). Others have denounced the focus on ‘the short past’ as overly narrow and thus potentially detrimental to the significance of history as a discipline (Guldi and Armitage Reference Guldi and Armitage2014), though not without pushback. The idea that historical miniatures or portraits might be politically or intellectually less relevant or ambitious than large sweeping landscapes is particularly suspect (Laite Reference Laite2020, 982). The detailed study of an individual historical moment can be an exceptionally challenging project with the most wide-ranging implications, as in, for instance, Colin Jones’s analysis of the final 24 hours of Robespierre’s life, which nonetheless tackles enormous questions about the French Revolution and indeed the nature of political power itself (Jones Reference Jones2021).

Asking big questions through a small lens is a well-established practice in humanities, social and natural sciences. A standard methodology is that of case studies, especially in fields where an abundance of sources or occurrences makes it impossible to adequately consider all of them. A case study approach commonly takes one or a few examples to stand as representative for a larger corpus – a kind of synecdoche where a specific case serves as a microcosm of the whole (Seawright and Gerring Reference Seawright and Gerring2008). This approach, which can easily cross disciplinary boundaries, allows scholars to test theories, suggest new hypotheses, explain exceptions to the rules and better elucidate causality. However, it may also be heavily influenced by pre-existing macro-models, generalisations and theories that may predetermine its conclusions. For social scientists, history is often used as a functional repository of quasi-experiments to investigate a non-historical (e.g. economic or sociological) question.

Since the 1970s many historians have sought to explore the minuscule as a way to discover new research perspectives through small, carefully focused but deep studies. This approach was pioneered by Italian scholars distrustful of grand theories, and found wide acceptance on both sides of the Atlantic. It soon went under the name of ‘microhistory’, though beneath this umbrella term lie several different academic traditions (Trivellato Reference Trivellato2015). If case studies seek out the typical and normative, Italian microhistorians aimed instead to study the overlooked, the marginalised, the unusual or anomalous through a painstaking investigation of primary sources. Carlo Ginzburg’s classic 1976 work The Cheese and the Worms exemplifies this approach: in his new preface to the 2013 revised edition, he notes that he had chosen to focus on those ‘whom many historians dismissed as marginal and usually ignored’ (Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg2013, x). In its quest for the particular and concrete, microhistory was also influenced by other disciplines such as anthropology and its use of ‘thick description’, but always in service of a history which challenges generalisations (Levi Reference Levi and Burke1995). It is perhaps no coincidence that this approach prominently emerged in Italy, a society long aware of its own diversity and heterogeneity, rather than in a society with a greater narrative of internal cohesion and homogeneity. In particular, microhistory was a reaction to, and rejection of, the focus on the long-term, macro-historical structures emphasised by the Annales school, and especially by Fernand Braudel, in its attempt to move beyond a ‘histoire événementielle’ (Ginzburg, Tedeschi and Tedeschi Reference Ginzburg, Tedeschi and Tedeschi1993, 12–14).

One of the oldest approaches to studying the past through a tight focus is biography. Biographers have traditionally selected prominent or well-known figures for their subjects, in contrast with microhistorians’ focus on the marginalised. Further, as Jill Lepore noted in 2001, in microhistory, ‘life story, like the mystery, is merely the means to an end – and that end is always explaining the culture’, whereas in a traditional biography the subject’s life story is centrally important (Lepore Reference Lepore2001, 133). Only recently has biography taken a more ‘microhistorical’ turn, investigating the lives of unknown figures and starting a closer dialogue with microhistory and other historiographical approaches (Renders and De Haan Reference Renders and Haan2014; Renders, De Haan and Harmsma Reference Renders, Haan and Harmsma2017). Although biography is still at times looked upon with suspicion in the profession as a ‘lesser’ historiographical method, biographical studies have proved particularly useful in contexts where traditional methodologies may not be easily applied: as Camilleri and Chelati Dirar observe in their article in this issue, biography has, for instance, become a crucial tool for African historians (Walraven Reference Walraven2020).

At the core of both microhistorical and biographic studies lies the tension between the singularity of the subject and its embeddedness within a larger context. If in the 1970s microhistory turned on the minuscule to illuminate the macroscopic, the ‘spatial turn’ and the growing success of global history has reignited the debate over the question of scale. The latest generation of microhistorians has shown that microanalysis may effectively intersect with transnational or global histories (Trivellato Reference Trivellato2011, Reference Trivellato2023). Authors such as Christian De Vito have called into question the very notion of scale, which should itself become an object of historical research (De Vito Reference De Vito2019, 348). He argues that we should ‘spatialise’ microhistory, proposing a ‘trans-local history’ or ‘micro-spatial history’ (De Vito Reference De Vito2015, Reference De Vito2019). This new approach aims to overcome too rigid a fixation on the small-scale and idiosyncratic explorations that may prevent comparisons or the drawing of wider connections. ‘Micro-spatial history’ would also move beyond too mechanical a conceptualisation of the relations between the micro and the macro, the local and the global. ‘Spatialising’ microhistory requires an acknowledgement that each space (or scale) is socially and historically constructed, and it is never a given. The ‘local’ can then been understood as a ‘contact zone’ between different spaces, rather than one pole within a dichotomy such as ‘centre and periphery’ (De Vito Reference De Vito2015, 817). ‘Micro-spatial histories’ as well as ‘global microhistories’ or ‘global lives’ overcome a stationary approach to the small scale and put at the forefront of research flows across permeable and socially constructed spaces.

Microhistory is inextricably linked to the concept of agency. Cross-fertilisation between global or transnational approaches and microhistory proves particularly fruitful in retracing agency across spaces. Julia Laite, author of a ‘global microhistory’ of sex trafficking (Laite Reference Laite2021), asks: ‘How do we explain large historical trends while also keeping individual agency in sight? How do we turn the small examples we deploy in social and cultural history into evidence for wider trends?’ (Laite Reference Laite2020, 965). In trying to answer these questions, she has persuasively explored the dynamics of what she calls ‘small histories’ (Laite Reference Laite2020). This term moves beyond the distinct methodological boundaries of microhistory or biography as traditionally understood, avoiding potentially fruitless debates. These histories are ‘small’ not because they are trivial or marginal; like little Davids, they can hold their own against the Goliaths of ‘big history’. ‘Small histories’ are uniquely suited to intersect with other approaches such as legal history or family history, as in the example of the ‘extraordinarily ordinary’ lives of two conscientious objectors in the Second World War (Rumsey Reference Rumsey2021). And they can profit no less than ‘big histories’ from the richness of data provided by the ‘mass digitised turn’ (Laite Reference Laite2020). Navigating conceptual and technological shifts in the discipline, small histories retain the power to ‘find exceptions, disrupt stereotypes, dismantle tropes, question stock characters, and challenge assumptions based on big data’ (Laite Reference Laite2020, 982), all of which enable us to better investigate historical change.

Given that the authors collected in this special issue have adopted a variety of methodologies, from anthropology to biography to close textual analysis, ‘small histories’ is perhaps the best way to collectively categorise them. A recent special issue of this journal dedicated to the sinking of the SS Arandora Star in 1940 has already shown how small histories may illuminate wider trends in the Italian case specifically (Colpi Reference Colpi2024). Through their focus on a single wartime episode and its context, these articles investigate topics as diverse and as significant as enemy aliens policy, the naval history of the Second World War and the politics of commemoration, as well as exploring methodological questions around oral history and archival materials.

In this special issue, by contrast, the versatility of ‘small histories’ is exploited not to create a kaleidoscope of the multiple aspects related to a single event, but rather to capture key moments of change during this last century of Italian history. In so doing it suggests how co-operation between scholars writing closely focused narratives need not mean abandoning any ambition to simultaneously widen the chronological and geographical horizon while integrating multiple layers of historical analysis, but can instead further this goal in new ways. Multiple ‘small histories’ around a theme can add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Transforming space, memory and identity

The studies collected here engage not only with change over time but with transformations of spaces, identities and memory, observed in close-up. Much recent historiography, including large-scale surveys, has focused on marginal spaces, on Italy’s borders and peripheries, or on marginalised people, such as colonial subjects and religious minorities. This attention to the excluded and the neglected – in keeping with Ginzburg’s focus on the ‘marginal and the usually ignored’ – can perhaps more easily be achieved through small histories than through grand narratives, as these articles illustrate. Although each article has a ‘small’ focus, the special issue tackles some of the most important themes and topics in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian politics, society and culture: Fascism and its legacies; colonialism; war; migration and the experiences of Italians abroad; gender and the family; race and the experiences of minorities; debates over heritage and memory. Each of these represents a lively field of scholarship in its own right, but can also serve to demonstrate the advantages of the scholarly magnifying glass.

Sean Wyer’s ‘micro-scale anthropological study of heritage’ reveals how the analysis of a single city can illuminate the relationship between the past and the present and the dialectic between history and memory (Nora Reference Nora1989). By exploring the rediscovery of Jewish heritage in Palermo, Wyer’s study investigates a form of double marginalisation. Palermo, a city often marginalised from the mainstream of Italian cultural and economic life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, is presented here as a laboratory for a new and deliberate shaping of cultural memory, while the Jewish experience in Sicily, long ignored or entirely forgotten, is returned from the margins to serve a contemporary political and social purpose. This tightly focused anthropological study has implications for contemporary Italian society, and for the role of the heritage industry, far beyond Palermo itself. Palermo’s local identity as a historical space is illustrated here as a social construct, paying due attention to both trans-Mediterranean networks and to the role of language (De Vito Reference De Vito2015, 827–828). The experience of contemporary Palermo stands in stark contrast with that of the diocese of Brixen/Bressanone in the 1930s. While Palermo’s ancient Jewish quartier now has multilingual street signs, in the 1930s the Fascist regime was trying to eradicate German from the educational system of South Tyrol, triggering the defensive reaction of Bishop Geisler with respect to Catholic religious instruction and creating a national affaire involving the Vatican and the central government, as illustrated by Eden McLean. The microhistorical lens offered by this study allows us to examine questions such as moral authority and civil–religious relations, which have a wider relevance beyond the 1930s. It also allows us to problematise the hierarchical dichotomy between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in a state where (Fascist and Catholic) Rome was blackmailed by a Tyrolean diocese.

The articles by Victoria Witkowski and by Nicola Camilleri and Uoldelul Chelati Dirar show that the huge and sprawling topic of Italian colonialism in the Fascist era may yet be usefully explored through small histories. Witkowski examines the larger-than-life figure of Fascist General Rodolfo Graziani through the lens of his postwar trial. While today he is notorious for his colonial war crimes, these were not the offences with which he was charged after the Second World War: instead, the courts were concerned with his acts against Italians, and he was tried for his collaboration with the Nazis in the period 1943–8. Witkowski considers the event from both national and transnational perspectives as well as from how it was perceived by Italians both at the time and much later, into the twenty-first century. In this way, a single moment in time can be used to explore multiple transitions (from Fascism to the republic) and historical changes (from condemnation to forgetting or to rehabilitation). Graziani was not a ‘typical’ general, insofar as there could be such a person, yet his case can speak to multiple aspects of Italian history and memory.

By contrast, Camilleri and Chelati Dirar use the biographical turn to underpin their study of Italo-Eritrean woman Elena Sengal, another exceptional – yet forgotten – historical figure who became one of the first Black women professional academics in Italy, despite the racist and sexist policies of the Fascist regime. An Italian citizen of African heritage, a scholar and a migrant, Sengal is a figure whose experiences can reveal much about the historical transformations of the Fascist and post-Fascist eras through which she lived. Significant topics as diverse as the Italian colonial administration and the impact of the 1938 race laws can be considered through the lens of her life story; her experiences challenge us to think more deeply about the co-opting power of Fascist totalitarianism. The article offers reflections on the possibilities, challenges and limits of this type of historical biography. Her mobility and multiple migrations also make her an example of those ‘global lives’ identified as a promising avenue for ‘global microhistories’ (Trivellato Reference Trivellato2011). Biographical studies of subaltern figures, whether individual or collective, have proved an essential development in the new imperial and colonial history, with its focus on mobility and entangled networks (e.g. Anderson Reference Anderson2012; Ghobrial Reference Ghobrial2014).

Mariella Terzoli, in her study of Italian enrolment in the French Foreign Legion in the postwar period, combines the ‘small histories’ of the single legionnaires with diplomatic and socio-economic history. By doing so, she retraces the individual motivations and experiences of Italian migrants enrolling in the Legion, while at the same time investigating how the Italian and French governments interpreted and tried to govern and exploit these waves of migration. Structural issues such as economic downturns, the Cold War and the transition towards a postcolonial world shaped the spaces of opportunity open to Italian men, who, in turn, on their own initiative, provided both new resources and challenges to national governments. This organic interaction between the macro-dimension of transnational processes and the individuality of single historical agents can also be found in the article by Niamh Cullen, who instead bases her analysis on one main source, the feminist magazine Effe, to explore how Italian feminists deconstructed and reimagined motherhood and maternal love in the 1970s. Drawing on the history of the emotions, the inherently intimate topic of motherhood that Cullen analyses here lends itself well to such a closely focused study, while the simultaneous universality of this topic also calls for connections and comparisons across time periods or societies.

All these articles demonstrate how fruitfully a close focus can illuminate the complex intersection of major themes – such as gender, race, religion, migration, colonialism, Fascism, memory, education and nation building – and spaces, be they physical – cities, borderlands, colonies – or political, ecclesiastical or social, in moments of transition and change. A single event (Graziani’s trial) or publication (Effe magazine), an individual life (Elena Sengal), a collective experience (Italian soldiers in the Foreign Legion), or the cultural politics of a single region (South Tyrol) or city (Palermo) can all enrich our understanding of the complexities of Italy’s transition(s) during and since the Fascist era.

Yet, despite their variety, these articles share some important themes and insights that transcend the boundaries of Italian history. They all deal with identity and the construction of spaces, thus confirming the usefulness of micro-approaches to space – or ‘micro-spatial’ approaches. Through its education policy, the Italian government aimed to Italianise South Tyrol, entering into conflict with both the local community, which wanted to defend its cultural heritage, and the Vatican, which had to protect its ‘catholic’ – that is, ‘universal’ – and inclusive identity while at the same time inhabiting a national space under the control of Fascist nationalists. Another set of territories subject to Italianisation were the African colonies. While McLean tells the story of a German-speaking bishop resisting assimilation policies in his diocese, Camilleri and Chelati Dirar provide us with the multifaceted portrait of a woman who had to assert herself both as a woman in a patriarchal society and as a Black Italian in the Fascist empire. Part of her success was due to her willingness to support the Fascist colonialist and assimilation policies in Ethiopia. Her identity as an Italian citizen was partly the involuntary result of the violent reshaping of the African space by Italian colonialism and partly the voluntary result of her quest for self-realisation, which implied her scholarly contribution to the furthering of the colonial agenda. On the one hand, Elena Sengal embodies the ideal of the self-reliant educated Italian woman and single mother that would appear in Effe magazine decades later and that contradicts every aspect of the Fascist female ideal, while on the other she was a colonial subject co-opted by the Fascist regime whose scholarly expertise lost value in postcolonial Italy.

Colonisation of the African space lies at the core of the identity of another Italian, this time typifying the Fascist male ideal: namely, Rodolfo Graziani. If Elena Sengal was pushed back from Italy to Ethiopia after the regime’s collapse, Graziani leveraged his stature as a ‘colonial hero’ to avoid punishment for his crimes against Italians as a Fascist leader. The interactions between space and identity also emerge in the lives of Italian legionnaires. Whether workers aspiring to a better future, former Fascists leaving Italy behind, or boys wishing to escape their families and towns, these Italian men became soldiers of a foreign country to fight its colonial war in Indochina, while triggering conflicts between Italy and France regarding the two countries’ ‘space of sovereignty’ over their mobile citizens.

Motherhood – its various forms and even rejection – has always been a key element in defining female identity. As the social transformations of the 1970s began to change women’s lives, feminist magazines provided an essential space that could be at once public, or collective, and intimately private. The space provided by Effe allowed women to explore their intimate emotions around motherhood. Physical spaces were also important to this process, as Cullen notes in describing the fight of young mothers in Lambrate (Milan) to autonomously manage the shelter in which they and their children lived. Both physical and virtual spaces were needed for mothers (and non-mothers) to fully realise their identities. Finally, and most obviously, the deliberate construction of identity through the management of space is at the heart of Wyer’s study. This does not happen in a vacuum. Rediscovering Palermo’s Jewish heritage and the historical urban convivenza of Christians, Muslims and Jews is a quintessentially local phenomenon that, however, rhymes with globalisation and cosmopolitanism, and develops alongside growing immigration from the Islamic world. But Wyer also deals with the virtual space of historical memory. As Witkowski also illustrates, contemporary perceptions of the past have their own weight and carve out their own space through different kinds of memory work, whether deliberate or unconscious.

Together, all these contributions evoke – explicitly or implicitly – the construction of spaces as places of identity. As ‘small histories’, they illustrate how careful attention to questions of space and identity may ultimately offer insights into wider transformations and changes in Italian society over the last century. Changing relationships between church and state, men and women, civilians and servicemen or Christians and Jews can all be traced through these snapshots, as can transformations in how Italian society has viewed colonialism, Fascism, gender, the family or race and ethnicity. Questions of identity and memory, both malleable and subjective historical phenomena, are ideally suited to an approach that allows the ‘small’ to shed light on the bigger picture of historical change.