SHUM 6710

Matters of Scale: Microhistory, Big History, and the Space Between Them

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

This seminar will introduce students to some of the classic and more recent works that have allowed historians to re-think geographical and temporal scales, paying particular attention to the definitions, possibilities, and limitations of microhistory, world history, global history, and big history and the multiple geographical scopes of regional histories. We will start by analyzing how historians have thought about scale as a useful tool to recast grand historical narratives, before moving to readings that offer critical takes on how microhistory, world history, and global history have been defined and used. We will then read a variety of case studies that have productively played with scale to uncover worlds that tended to be eclipsed by approaches that favored national or conventional area studies frameworks.

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