Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I've been thinking about the Jim Croce song, "Don't Mess Around With Jim." SPOILER ALERT: If you don't know the song, and want to be surprised by the final verse thereof should you someday listen to it, don't read further. It's a song about what is sometimes nowadays called "micro-history." Micro-history is a term for scholarly inquiries into a narrow slice of space and time, a specific and localized event, and usually not one that strikes a non-professional reader as the obvious concern of History with the capital "H." So, for example, a careful study of a miller brought to trial by the Inquisition for heretical views in the 16th century became a micro-historical classic. This is in part because the narrow slice of time and space involved, but also because the miller at the heart of the story  was an ordinary fellow, not an aristocrat, diplomat, judge. And that brings us back to Jim Croce. The song tells the tale of a confli...

Schama's new book is a single-volume thing called THE STORY OF THE JEWS: FINDING THE WORDS 1000 BC - 1492 AD. Wow. Not quite 2,500 years. And about 500 pages, so if we round off both numbers a bit we get a coverage of five years per page. I suppose someone tried to talk Schama out of ending his book with the circumstances of the Jews in the reconquered Spain of 1492. Someone must have tried, but couldn't 'torquemada' any such thing. I've always been fascinated by really sweeping books like this, especially the single volume type, because multi-volume sets seem like cheating. Digging into a small patch, writing a micro-history and finding it as complicated as, well, 2,500 years in the history of Jews, is another kind of achievement, and its value has come to me only more recently, as I've appreciated the fractal nature of historical fact. You can write history as fascinating working at the five-minutes-a-page scale.