David Lennington's Full Review
David Lennington, Ph, D. in English
It was 2002 when I first got my hands on a copy of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I was in Micronesia, and Zinn's book was sitting on a bookshelf in the Peace Corps Volunteer lounge of Chuuk State. I must have read the title on the spine and thought about it for a few weeks before picking it up. "How nice," I reflected, "that someone has finally written a history from the perspective of everyday people, rather than telling 'big man' histories centered around famous people, treating world history as their sole province." When I actually read the book, I realized I was wrong. The book, for all its merits, still centered history around the lives of political leaders, and was short on details of how non-famous people lived and what they thought.
It would be another six years or so before I learned the term "microhistory." I was studying at Princeton by this time, and went to as many history lectures as I could fit into my schedule. I was excited about the idea of microhistories, because of its potential for opening up stories that were normally left out. After attending a number of talks and paper presentations by researchers describing their project as a form of "microhistory," I was left with the impression that these studies sometimes took up "smaller" topics but almost always filtered through the lens of canonical structures of power; that is to say, I was at best getting the perspectives of powerful people describing the powerless.
This, of course, leaves us with all kinds of problems. A tenured academic in the Northeast will not well understand my life, even in the unlikely circumstance that he or she were to try to narrate it some time down the line. This is not necessarily to blame the attempt: they don't and can't care about the struggles and small triumphs of my life; the distance is simply too great.
Having thought about all this for years now, it was with great pleasure that I read Joe Marullo's book My Mother's Quilt. This is not academic microhistory, it is family history, told by a son about his family, for his family. There is, as one might expect, much in it that will be of interest to anyone who wants to better understand our last century, the immigrant experience, and the humble but ultimately grand ways that Americans of all sorts made their life and grew their families in this continent. I will be honest: I hope that everyone who reads Marullo's book decides to write their own. If there is a way to approach history that allows it to be uncoupled from centers of authority and told by people for whom it means something, Marullo's book is the way to do it.