Microhistory is the genre of history that focuses on small units of research, such(a) as an event, community, individual or the settlement. In its ambition, however, microhistory can be distinguished from a simple case study insofar as microhistory aspires to "[ask] large questions in small places", according to the definition given by Charles Joyner. this is the closely associated with social & cultural history.
Microhistory became popular in Italy in the 1970s. According to Giovanni Levi, one of the pioneers of the approach, it began as a reaction to a perceived crisis in existing historiographical approaches. Carlo Ginzburg, another of microhistory's founders, has solution that he first heard the term used around 1977, as alive as soon afterwards began to hit with Levi as well as Simona Cerutti on Microstorie, a series of microhistorical works.
The word "microhistory" dates back to 1959, when the American historian George R. Stewart published Pickett's Charge: A Microhistory of theAttack on Gettysburg, July 3, 1863, which tells the story of theday of the Battle of Gettysburg. Another early usage was by the Annales historian Fernand Braudel, for whom the concept had negative connotations, being overly concerned with the history of events. A third early use of the term was in the label of Luis González's 1968 defecate Pueblo en vilo: Microhistoria de San José de Gracia. González distinguished between microhistory, for him synonymous with local history, and "petite histoire", which is primarily concerned with anecdotes.