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

You’ve probably seen these sorts of books. They’re often popular in airport bookstores, since their single-minded focus makes them easy to market, and their brevity means they can be inhaled during a single flight. Better yet, they endow readers with oddball trivia one can bust out over drinks. (“Did you know Ancient Rome paid for its wars with taxes on salt?”) For years, microhistories have scratched the monomaniacist’s itch that is, today, probably more often scratched by losing oneself in Wikipedia ratholes.

Nonetheless, I still read loads of microhistories, and very often on paper, like an animal.

Why? Why do I dig them so?

It’s because of their narrowness.

The problem with “big” books: They’re often too shallow

We live in a period where there’s a certain vogue for the opposite type of book: The huge book, the broad tome with a history-spanning Theory of Everything — books like Sapiens, or Guns, Germs and Steel, which promise to reveal the subterranean trends propelling civilization.

These books tend to range across a mammoth amount of subjects — the role of weather in Napoleon’s defeat! the construction of the American interstate highways! Henri Poincare’s meditations on mathematical creativity! — in an attempt to show how the big idea Explains Everything. Imbibe this book, the publisher and author promise, and you too will intuit the deep patterns illuminating humanity’s next five centuries, or, at least, the upcoming Q2 for your layoffs-as-a-service startup. Books like this have been around for eons, though they probably metastatized culturally with the late-20th-century success of bestsellers like Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock or Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.

The big problem with this sort of writing is, of course, that by trying to cover so much ground, the authors often cover it shallowly. One skips like a stone across the lake of history. (I should point out that while I’m poking fun at the pretensions of this type of book, I arguably tried to write one myself, so consider this also as self-mockery.)

Keeping a narrow focus — but going deep — is much more fun

But here’s the thing: If the problem of “big” books is that they’re wide but shallow, microhistories invert this proposition. They are stubbornly narrow in scope. Almost hilariously so: There are microhistories devoted to the pencil, champagne, the color indigo, and dozens and dozens of other subjects.

Yet the narrowness of the focus is where the magic lies. By putting a single subject under such Xtreme closeup, microhistories wind up being — to my eyes, anyway — much richer as a way to understand the world.

After all, when you drill down deeply into a single subject, you nearly always realize: Holy crap, this is more complex than I’d have thought. This is true of just about any subject, right? And it’s exactly the opposite feeling you get from a “big” book, which strives to make you feel like you understand how Everything Is Explained By This One Specific Idea. When you gloss over a subject from 50,000 feet in the air, as those big books often do, you can feel a sense of dangerous knowingness. You’ve been insulated from the gnarly details; you think you know what’s going on, but you really don’t.

In contrast, when you dive obsessively into a single, narrow subject, it humbles you about about the state of your overall knowledge. If there’s this much to know about cod — or pencils, or champagne and salt and ice and gramophones? Then you become usefully aware not of your knowledge but of your overall ignorance. You’re reminded that, as ever, that the devil’s in the details.

Infinity in a grain of sand

But so are the angels. Diving deeply into a narrow subject also feels absolutely wonderful! That’s because when you focus closely on just one domain, you have a better chance of learning it well.

You can also, it’s worth noting, wind up connecting — quite organically — to the arc of history.

For example, this weekend I read a microhistory about beavers. It begins with a lot of fascinating biological minutia about the structure of beaver-teeth and how they evolved to cut down trees. (Trivia: They don’t chew with both teeth at once! They sort of shave away with the bottom set.) But then the book morphs into a discussion of the co-evolution of beavers and humans (we found their dams to be useful piles of pre-cut wood), and from then into the extractionist morass of early America and Canada — when European explorers created such a voracious market for beaver pelts that the animal was hunted to a shade of its former population, with seismic effects on indigenous societies too. (First-nations trappers were closely involved with the massive western firms buying beaver pelts, a connection that created vectors for horrific viral outbreaks and, as several first-nations chiefs noted ruefully at the time, overreliance on the easy money that came from plundering natural resources.)

Infinity is, bien sur, in a grain of sand. Start small and you wind up big.

And hey, there are lessons in this for everyday life, right? Start narrow and go deep, and you’ll often wind up with stuff that resonates beyond the original domain. I’ve found this all the time in my journalism. I’ll start off researching something that seems incredibly niche — like the debates over whether latent semantic analysis is a useful way to automatically grade college essays — and after a few weeks, when I’m really deep in the weeds, I’m learning about how it connects to the mystery of how humans acquire language.

A list of my fave microhistories

And now it’s TIME FOR A LIST.

I’ll leave you with seven of my favorite microhistories. This is not an exhaustive list — just the top few that came to mind …

• Once They Were Hats: In Search of the Mighty Beaver, by Frances Backhouse: This is the book I mentioned above! It dives into the history of Castor canadesis, a truly weird creature that terraformed North America long before humans did, and might yet be crucial to helping us adapt to climate change. Fascinating stuff about how beavers evolved, how they build multistory dwellings, and their massive economic impact in early America
• Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife: The genius of this book is that by latticing it around various civilization’s treatment of zero — the ancient Greeks and early Christians regarded it as either useless or heretical, while early Islam and India embraced it — he gives you a cultural story, while also diving deep into the incredibly weird mathematical qualities of zero (and its cousin, infinity).
• Rust: The Longest War, by Jonathan Waldman: I’d never thought about rust much before, but plenty of people have — ranging from the folks who maintain the Statue of Liberty to the engineers making canned food to the navy, which, as the custodian of many very large metal objects that need to be immersed in water, regards rust as its biggest single threat. Waldman talks to them all, and it’s a phenomenal weaving of culture and science.
• The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine, by Tom Standage: This one’s a blast. It’s the tale of the mechanical automaton created by Wolfgang von Kempelen that claimed to be a form of steampunk AI, playing an extremely good game of chess (against, even, Napoleon). There’s plenty of gnarly detail about the European rage for automata and chess itself, and it works as a nice meditation on our relationship to supposedly “smart” machines.
• Coal: A Human History, by Barbara Freese: A terrific dive into where coal came from (not decomposed ancient dinosaurs, as pop culture would have it, but decomposed ancient plants), its mammoth impact during the Industrial Revolution, and its waning power.
• Clara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe, by Glynis Ridley: A wild story of how a Dutch sea captain took a three-ton Indian rhino on a trip across Europe. You arrive for the nutty details of the difficulty of this task (supplying food for a rhino while shipping it over water is not easy), and stay for how it illuminates Europe’s mentality at the time — a mixture of colonialist ideas with genuine curiosity about the rest of the planet.
• 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, collaboratively written by ten authors: This book is about a single line of code for the Commodore 64 — the line that, wonderfully, is the title for the book. What did the line do? Generate an infinitely unfolding maze pattern. The authors use this scrap of code to meditate on everything from the mechanics of the Commodore 64 and its role in tech culture to the historic meaning of mazes. Truly wonderful.