I've been reading Michel Foucault for a while. He deals a lot with history and I got particularly curious on his genealogy methods. What he says seems to resemble a lot of what historians said about avoiding presentism and examining history not just from the big figures but from small details (please correct me on that though).

Being unfamiliar with the fields of history, I wonder what exactly is Foucault's influence in the field? I'm particularly curious with the "genealogy" method... which leads me to a follow-up question: if Foucault is influential, I wonder, how does a genealogical work look like? Foucault keep distinguishing "effective history" (which employs genealogy) with "traditional history". His explanation is succinct enough, but I'm curious to know some examples.

I appreciate the help!

Here is some relevant passage I quote from Foucault's Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,

Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined form on all its vicissitudes.

On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations-or conversely, the complete reversals-the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us ... it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what w e are, but the exteriority of accidents.

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The role of genealogy is to record its history: the history of morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or of the ascetic life; as they stand for the emergence of different interpretations, they must be made to appear as events on the stage of historical process.

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We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference.

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The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which metaphysicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us.

"Antiquarian history," according to the Untimely Meditations, pursues opposite goals. It seeks the continuities of soil, language, and urban life in which our present is rooted, and, ''by cultivating in a delicate manner that which existed for all time, it tries to conserve for posterity the conditions under which we were born."