Mountains, Microbes and Miniatures: Questions of Scale and the Role of Alltagsgeschichte in the Future of Environmental Historical Research

Description

The current pandemic age highlights an important future trajectory for environmental history, one in which the field’s interdisciplinarity and more-than-human viewpoints facilitate a deeper analysis of the human-microbe interactions that have shaped our shared pasts. Despite the study of disease being part of the discipline’s remit since its outset, environmental historical engagement with disease remains stifled by conceptual challenges of scale, geography, and period. This paper uses a case study of early 20th-century Californian responses to influenza to demonstrate the merits of adopting a new methodological approach to studying disease within environmental history which overcomes these challenges through a revaluation of focus and scale.
German historian Alf Lüdtke’s pioneering concept of Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life) provides the ideal framework for studying the multi-layered interactions between humans and diseases. Galvanised by Aldo Leopold’s call to ‘think like a mountain’ or Nancy Langston’s more recent recommendation to ‘think like a microbe’, existing environmental historical engagement with pandemics considers only the diametric extremes of scale, but this paper demonstrates that that it is not the ‘mountain’ of national death tolls, nor the cell infection of the ‘microbe’ that reveals the human-environment interactions at the core of humanity’s pandemic experiences. Rather, it is the everyday reality of routines changed, milestones missed, and milk not delivered which define human-microbe interactions under pandemic conditions, and it is only though embracing the methodology which supports the study of these quotidian snapshots (coined ‘miniatures’ by Lüdtke) that environmental history will equip itself for its pandemic future.

Period	3 Apr 2023
Event title	Northern Environmental History Network Annual In-Person Workshop: The Future of our Past: Where is Environmental History Heading?
Event type	Workshop
Location	Durham, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	Regional