Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl
Today’s theme is a school freebie, so I’m going to talk about something that doesn’t usually fit into the speculative fiction I blog about here.
As per Wikipedia, microhistory “is the intensive historical investigation of a well defined smaller unit of research (most often a single event, the community of a village, a family or a person).”
I enjoy learning about history in general, but microhistory is by far my favorite way to explore the past.
You can learn so much about all of our ancestors by exploring how they handled incurable diseases, dealt with racism, treated orphans, decided what to eat, and so much more.
All of these books are excellent, by the way!
If you have any suggestions of similar reads or enjoyed the ones I’m about to share, I’d love to hear about it. If you’re not a fan of history, tell me what subjects you did like in school.
Let’s geek out together.
1. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
2. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
3. Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
4. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore
5. Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel
6. Children’s Homes: A History of Institutional Care for Britain’s Young by Peter Higginbotham
7. Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
8. The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson: Separating Fact from Fiction by Gregory Klages
9. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England by Judith Flanders
10. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts
11. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade by Ann Fessler