Let's flip the question around: why is mainstream history important? What's the point in studying George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler (and his breakfast cereal)?

When you break it down on a philosophical level, the big topics that are covered in general education are just as useful (or useless, depending on your point of view) as niche topics are. The same goes for the importance of recent history vs the more distant past. It's all just stuff dead people did long time ago.

A hypothetical example: In the next couple of years, VR will really take off and soon enough our recreational activities will take place inside realistically feeling virtual realities (yeah, I do hear the 90s calling, I'll talk to them later). 300 years from now, couple of friends (on cool floating chairs, in a synthetic ivory tower) will be making fun of their historian pal, dedicating his time to the history of videogames - which to them is about 40 years of a blip before the really important things happened, in the "non-important" entertainment business history anyways. But we are living in that blip and to us, videogames are actually a huge part of the culture. We can't dismiss anything that from distance seems non-essential, if we truly want to get to know our past. Looking at the bits with wars and politicians making speeches, is simply not enough.

Also, it's fun.

Little things often tell big stories. I heard a talk by a young professor last year about beards in 19th century America. On its face, it's a silly topic -- who, besides fashion magazines, needs to know about facial hair a hundred years ago? But beards, it turns out, connect to a lot of other things: racism, trade laws, masculinity, steel production, immigration, barber shops, economic mobility -- all sorts of bigger questions that help us make sense of how we got to where we are now. (This professor wrote a short op-ed about what beards can tell us about bigger questions, which you can read here.)

My own research concerns spearheads from sixth-century Britain. This, too, feels pretty niche, but I use these weapons to provide a new perspective on the social changes that brought Britain out from the Roman empire and into new kingdoms in the early middle ages. I write about how arming a society changes the way people relate to each other, how collapsing economic structures create opportunities as well as limitations, how royal power in the seventh century was forced to react to a culture in which militias were the basic social unit, and what it means to live through a period of radical social collapse and transformation. These are questions we face today (and that's why I write about them -- living in the present, I care about these questions myself). Spearheads aren't the only way to talk about ideas changes, but focusing on them sheds new perspectives on some very old questions, and is helping me to avoid some of the pitfalls of other studies of the middle ages (such as groupism, which we discussed in yesterday's Monday Methods post), and to gain a perspective on how violence works in a society that's not so familiar as the one in which we live every day.

I have colleagues who use medieval jewelry to trace trade routes and understand how people moved across the ancient landscape; who study pots to understand what people ate and, thereby, how our own dietary preferences in the present -- just like those of people in the past -- are and aren't shaped by cultural influences. I once read a book about an obscure early 20th century historian in Luxembourg who studied his country's medieval history; this man's obscure story changed how I think about the entire project of recording the past.

That's what history does: it takes small, specific things from the past and connects them to bigger questions. The things we study are often not significant in themselves: someone's old notes, dusty records, trash dug up by an archaeological team -- etc. It's not the things themselves that matter (though most historians tend to love old stuff for its own sake, too), but what they can tell us about what it means to be humans who live in a complex, interconnected world with a deep history bubbling beneath its surface, waiting to be explored.

You'll never understand what it meant to be a woman for most of human history (up until the industrial revolution) unless you understand the immense, unending daily labor that went into the production of everyday peasant dress in, say, the middle ages. Without understanding that, we'll never know how truly magically remarkable our lives today are.

Well, I can say personally niche historians are extremely important to those mainstream historians. I cannot tell you the number of times I've sought an academic, scholarly opinion on, for example, where a bible from the early 1500's was produced. My knowledge of the Reformation could allow me to make an educated guess it was in Germany, but a niche religious-bibliophile-historian could tell me from which factory it was produced. So to many 'broad-brush' historians, niche historians are extremely important to take their work all that more comprehensive.