Patrick Response for Week 8

          I found Lepore’s discussion on the nature of presenting the individual histories of particular individuals to be very interesting, partially because that is part of my paper’s goal. The distinction between “microhistory” and the necessarily opposite “macrohistory” provides us with a language in which we can discuss the different goals that a particular historical work might have. A macrohistorical work may ignore the details of daily life in the 18^th century in order to make an argument as to the causes of the Seven Years’ War, while a microhistorical work might be concerned with examining the motivations behind several members of the Iroquois Confederacy in fighting with the British.

It seems to me that microhistory is less concerned with the causes and effects of certain historical events but rather focuses on an individual in order to give its reader a contextual understanding of what that person’s life was like, which could be a means of understanding life in that time period in general. This analysis of the different goals of the two histories reinforced my understanding that historical writing that may seem “small” is still inherently valuable like historical writing that claims to explain the fall of an empire or the start of a war. My paper focuses on several individuals, and I hope that in writing it I will be able to give my readers an impression of what multiple experiences of American Jews in the South during the Civil War could have been like. My goal is to show several microhistories, and although my paper will not be making arguments as to why events during the war turned out as they did, I plan to show that the historical analysis of specific people can provide a greatly important understanding of one experience of 19^th century life.