How do historians deal with issues of scale?

by Muskwatch

The biggest even in my nation's history (the Metis nation) was a battle that involved 500 of us fighting the Canadian government at Batoche. The most significant even in the history of the people where I now live, the Nuxalk, was the smallpox epidemic, which resulted in the death of some ninety to 95 percent of the population, between three and ten thousand deaths.

Looking at either one of these events against a backdrop of the first world war or the numbers involved in western migration and settlement makes them seem insignificant drops in a the history bucket, yet at the same time, they are everything to those of us who call these stories ours - how to make sense of this?

Is there any sort of convention within history departments regarding what stories are worthy of being pursued? Or is it a free-for-all limited only by how convincingly you can ask your questions and how interestingly you can tell your stories?

I suspect there is no answer to this, but someone else must of asked themselves these questions before and come up with at least partial answers.

Or is it a free-for-all limited only by how convincingly you can ask your questions and how interestingly you can tell your stories?

Mostly this.

Journals have target audiences, and try to publish articles of interest to their readership. For journals that treat specific subjects, that might favor small-scale stories with very local or specific interest like the history of a single, small tribe, or an event that occurred within a specific time or place that the journal tends to cover. Journals that reach and target a wider audience try to publish articles that speak to larger questions, but how precisely that wider interest is achieved is often rather flexible; a historian discussing the events within a small nation like your might show how they help us to understand wider social processes beyond the events themselves, or show how these small-scale events give an important balancing perspective to narratives that focus only on white Canadian history. If successful, these kinds of 'microhistorical' approaches can be incredibly helpful, and can be published in leading journals with wide audiences because they use small details to tell big stories.

When considering tenure and career advancement, university administrators tend to look at where you publish and how many people find your work useful (by citing it and discussing it); if you can sell the importance of a small community to a wide audience and publish it in a larger journal, that will usually be received favorably. But just publishing in small, local journals (say, the local county's historical society) is usually frowned upon if you're researching at a larger university, because it suggests your work isn't of national or international interest (and big research universities are trying to contribute to larger conversations).

So it depends more upon whether you can sell the small stories as being worth general attention, and helpful for other people's research, outside the communities where they took place. Many historians do this very effectively.

History, at its heart, is all about the little stories. Books that set out overarching narratives for, say, the 20th century are important because they give us a way to tie together all the pieces into a story that helps us make sense of the world. But these kinds of sweeping projects always rely upon a host of smaller studies that look at specific archives, specific communities, and individual stories, and then weave these stories into something bigger. History is inductive, taking small things and using them to talk about big things. A good historical study shows how ordinary documents, records, letters, and events tie into bigger stories.

So there's always room for small stories. But they're best received when their authors can show how the people they describe fit into something larger than themselves, whether that's looking at the effects of smallpox on a single small community, or how one nation's resistance to western expansion allows us to better understand the larger social forces of which it was an inseparable part.