Why “Microhistories” Rock

On the value of digging really deep into a narrow subject

Clive Thompson
7 min readSep 26, 2022

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Yeah, I spent the weekend reading about beavers

I am a sucker for “microhistories”.

In the world of publishing, the “microhistory” is a term of art for a particular type of book. They tend to be …

  • short
  • focused on one single subject, and
  • usually historical

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Clive Thompson

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net