Hello World!

Welcome to Pensive Ponderings!

As time goes on, I will be adding my thoughts about various topics to this blog and, I hope, you will be adding your comments about those same topics and my thoughts.  As a forewarning, I will say now that most of these will concern the various 'microhistory' books that I will be reading and thus you may not find some of them interesting.  That being said, please do check back at other times because you never know when the topic will change dramatically.

The question that should pop into most people's minds now is "What is a microhistory?".  That is a fair questions since novels and textbooks are the far more common types of books that people encounter.  The origins of the microhistory is actually linked to the first microhistory that I read (The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, by Carlo Ginzberg).  Charles Joyner put it nicely when he said that microhistories "search for answers to large questions in small places." Basically, the author(s) chooses a specific person, item, etc. and makes it the topic of intensive research and shows a link between the topic and its importance to history.  The idea for microhistory started in 1970's Italy with intellectuals such as Giovanni Levi and Carlo Ginzberg.  The concept spread to inspire research by French and German historians throughout the 1980's and 1990's.  The works are part of many lines of research including cultural history (The Cheese and the Worms), social history (Intangible Heritage: The Career of an Exorcist in the Piedmont of the Seventeenth Century), and historical anthropology (The Return of Martin Guerre). 

More recently, there have been some particularly intriguing mircohistories by authors such as Mark Kurlansky (Salt: A World History, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, etc), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, etc), and Benjamin Wallace (The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine).

One final note in this opening post, I would like to apologize for the URL using 'ponderment', but every variation using 'pondering' has already been taken.  The more depressing bit of news is that all of them are years outdated, some with more than a decade of inactivity and most with only one or two posts total.  Perhaps these people are simply being particularly pensive about the topics that they find worth pondering, but I am more of the mind that these blogs have been abandoned.

Check back in the future, make comments, and enjoy some of the reading yourself!