It is time to revive the historical section of this weblog, who quite naturally had paused while I was studying history took a year off. But ... finished laughing, I now have in hand the student card which shows my registration M1, I am back in my source which I shall, finally, an inventory Analytical short, business resumed. We recently discussed
side from Zid on the weight being taken in the work of the historian, the life stories of the past that the characters emerge from the literature for us to say hello.
There was a time, yet not so old, which held the upper hand in quantitative historians, which was to banish the anecdotal, the pediment, severe, their historical construction, reads, in letters Gold: What if no one does here is serial number! That time now seems behind we increase the historian and now the eyebrow ring out when the curse of a Chaunu. We found the taste of retail lighting, signs that speak volumes - with Carlo Ginzburg and his Italian colleagues, of course, but also with people like Paul Veyne, which proves that it is not only a question generation. These details are often stories of life, or fragments of life, as What can sometimes glimpse in our documentation. Outside the emotional character of these meetings, they often tell us more about ancient societies that dry statistics based on series necessarily problematic before 1800.
A small example from my ongoing research, involving an ironworks in the late eighteenth century. I have an exceptional document, a complete list of plant personnel, about 170 people. Most of them are men, with some rare exceptions, including this one, which intrigued me:
So two women of about thirty years, employed in a profession that 'At first I did not understand - they are also the only exercise it. Finally, other documents allowed me to better understand what it is: the setter and the cinders are impurities charcoal (used in large quantities in blast furnaces of the time), produced by charring the wood of a certain type of fungi. They can be annoying in the blast furnace and cons is very useful for other uses such as molding. The mission of Marguerite Mesnard and Madelaine Chanbeau is to rummage through the pile of coal to remove a certain type of coal. The activity is unattractive and, in addition, to the extent any technical treatise that I know does not mention, it is probably not essential for the proper functioning of the company.
Account Given their age, so I assumed he was widowed, probably from workers at the foundry, and they were given this work to enable them to have a small income. Besides, I think I found traces of the remarriage of Margaret Mesnard in the registry of the municipality, in which it is given as a widow her husband, a widower, too, belongs à'une family with several members employed foundry. That tells me
Mesnard Marguerite? As steel to pre-industrial world is a harsh, where people die young of illness or accident that, however, the solidarity exists in this tiny industry (it is far from us thousand workers in large factories in the next century): you do not drop the widow of a deceased worker. And it makes me a little wink through the centuries and administrative documents which are our sources, to remember that history is the sum of all these individual lives that have succeeded, sometimes with brilliance sometimes with the utmost discretion.
History is always stories of lives.
