Historical Scale

Wednesday January 11, 2012

Today's topic was historical scale.  Historical scale is the level in which a subject is being presented.  There are two different scales:  Mirco-History and Macro-History.  Micro-History began to grow during the 1980s and is still building momentum.  Mirco-History deals with people, places, and events in history on a small scale.  This type of approach can be very detailed and can describe how a certain type of people lived.  An example of Mirco-History would be focusing on a small village in Vietnam during the 1960s and 70s.  This history would focus on how the war directly effected a small group of people including: what they believed, how they lived, how the war effected them, and more.  Micro-History can be very interesting, but it has it's downfalls.  For instance, because this type of history only focuses on a small area, it can be overlooked or not though to be as important as a history that deals with a larger region.
Next, is Macro-History.  This is the type of history that everyone is familiar with because almost every textbook K-12 is written from a Macro-History stand point.  Macro-History looks at history as a whole.  It is a very general history.  An example of Macro-History would simply be a book on the Vietnam War.  This would be a general overview of the war and would only include major battles and things that are considered most important.  Macro-History is very impersonal and does not touch base upon specific people and how they are effected by an event.  Macro-History is also used to compare different events in history at a glance (such as comparing World War I to World War II).
In order to find interesting and useful history, people need to use a middle-level perspective.  This way, a broad event is being explained and how it effected many people, but it will also go into details about specific groups of people.  By using this approach, a reading can compare events from a broad scale, but also compare how individual groups felt about the event.  For example, a book about the Vietnam War that tells both the American side and the Vietnamese side of the war would be helpful.  Both sides are present and can be compared using thoughts, actions, beliefs, and more.
Our Lincoln's Constitution book is mainly Micro-History because it only discusses the time period in which Lincoln was alive and the Civil War era.  The book does not include anything about any other country besides the U.S.  The text does, however, do an excellent job at describing what different people thought of the ideas of slavery, civil war, constitutionalism, sovereignty, and more.  The book is not so much of a debate about slavery, as it is a debate about if the Southern states had the right to succeed from the Union.  The issue of slavery was simply used to justify reasons for succession.  From our debate on Wednesday, a good question was brought up:  would a co-presidency where a Northern elected president and a Southern elected president work?  If both presidents had equally shared powers, would America have avoided the Civil War and the succession crisis?  In my personal opinion, no it would not have worked.  Both presidents would have eventually tried to get the upper hand and would not want to work together on anything.  Each president would put issues that were in his region's best interest first.  During the actual Civil War there were two presidents: Lincoln and Davis.  Neither of these two men could come together in order to reach a settlement to end the war, so they probably would not have accomplished much before the war and succession either.  With an issue such as the U.S. Civil War, Micro-History is better to use because it can give an in-depth view.  Macro-History would just give the general points of the war, but the reader would still be wanting to know what people were thinking during the time.  I truly enjoy history, but when it comes down to it, I like to do two things:  read about Macro-History to get the general details, then, if I am still interested, gather information on a micro-level in order to further understand the situations, events, and impacts.