It's this "bottom up" history that makes a story come alive. As a "consumer" of history, those are the details I love. What were they wearing, eat, hygiene -- anything that effects their daily routine. It gives a much fuller picture than just King X won a decisive victory over the Y in the year Z... how was the king feeling that moring? That "bottoms up" factor is what adds depth to that victory on that day in history. Because the opposing army all ate rotten apples that morning and their soaked clothing was a disadvantage on the field... and they were all sick because of camp conditions. I want to know all that stuff. I don't read much historical fiction, but do appreciate a good narrative when reading non-fiction. (and I understand that "bottom up" can only be done when the sources are available, etc. and extrapolation is dangerious... but from a consumer point of view, I love it)

The problem with bottom up is bag of sources. Once I had a professor say that unless someone left a record of themselves, they didn't exist. This may be mean and counter productive to history but it shows the other side of the problem, how can I prove someone existed without evidence?

Beyond the theological arugment, one made for an illiterate peasant in the Ancien Regime France is hard to make unless they had someone record their history. Worse of course if there is little archaeological evidence to support arguments made about their life style.

I will never say that bottom up history isn't useful but it has its faults simply due to a problem of sources.

While I am not exactly a fan of questions in the format "I am X in year Y" (I think that belongs into the realm of speculative or historic fiction) I am a fan of subaltern history.

So, what does this mean from my point of view? A lot of the things I do have to do with epigraphics, i.e. the study of inscriptions, particularly from Roman antiquity. The big benefit here is that inscriptions actually allow the subaltern to speak! When you look at contemporary accounts of life in antiquity, all of the literary material we have was written by the '1%', the elite. This is a big and significant discrepancy. The bottom strata of society of course do feature in this works, but they are written about, they don't write. We don't get their names, except in rare cases.

Inscriptions, while still expensive, were an ubiquitous feature of Roman Imperial society, and they were produced by and for a large part of the population. They erected tombstones for themselves and their loved ones, scribbled grafitti on the walls along the streets, wrote on wooden or waxen tablets, produced leaden curse tablets, erected altars to honour and thank the gods and godesses.

In most cases (except for e.g. grafitti) they did not write or inscribe those themselves, many would have been illiterate. That work was done by a professional, and according to customary formula and with designs out of a scrapbook, and in many cases, even the eulogical poetry was copy and paste. However, via these inscriptions we get a direct view into their lives.

We get to know their names, which is very interesting in and of itself. We get to know who they loved, to whom they were married, the names of their children and their parents, their slaves, their masters, their friends and comrades. They inscribed their careers, what their trade was, how long they served and where, under which commander, what rank they held and sometimes in which wars they participated.

Some tell us which gladiator they favoured, who they had sex with, with whom they partied in Pompeji until they were black out drunk; what clothes they wore and what haircuts they had.

We are told what gods they sacrificed to, and where, whether they prayed to their old gods or the new, Roman ones, and so on and so forth.

Most importantly, they tell us how they saw themselves, and how they wanted to be represented to the world, their identity. To me, this is very interesting. In short, all these data help us to flesh out the picture of society on the lower ranks, we can reconstruct and infer a lot of it, and taken together with archeological evidence, the picture only gets better.

For the academics among us, has your particular specialty embraced or rejected "bottom up" history?

I'd say it has very much embraced it, there is lots of new work being done, most importantly in recent times on those questions of identity, and also of gender. Women of course feature prominently in inscriptions, much more than in the literary accounts, and there is an increasing focus to work out what differences there were in the epigraphic culture of women, and how they used that medium to represent themselves, and how their use might have differed from a male one.

Ooh, good question!

The biggest benefit I can think of is helping students empathize with people they might not normally understand. For example, I had an "honors" class that focused primarily on modern China. Several freshmen from a local Christian school were in the class. They were in disbelief that a large number of Chinese would voluntarily turn to communism. They were incapable of understanding why Chinese peasants lives were so bad until the professor drove home what their lives were like. Granted, it was more about general misery and fear than about what they used to brush their teeth, but you get the idea.

I think a lot of us have a general curiosity about things. We just like to know stuff, even if that stuff doesn't matter. The moderation in this sub is more effective than I've seen anywhere else, but every now and then I come across a comment thread with a lot of votes that has been deleted by the mods and think, "Damn! What did I miss?"

For the academics among us, has your particular specialty embraced or rejected "bottom up" history?

Answering late (as usual), but I'd say my field has largely rejected it - although "rejected" is a very strong word. We've accepted that the movement of fashion through society was top-down through most of history, that the extant clothing we have to study is heavily skewed toward the upper end of the spectrum, and that the images we have are generally either accurate depictions of the upper end, sentimental/satirical depictions of the lower, or confusing - it's hard to interpret the glut of photographic portraits/snapshots from the late 19th century on when you don't know who's pictured, what their social status is, and sometimes when the picture was taken. There are people who focus specifically on lower-status groups, but for the most part we talk about the history of fashion as the history of changes in styles among the wealthy and extrapolate downwards.

There are individuals who study specific subaltern/lower-status groups, however.