Arthur Krystal's review of Roger Ekirch, At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, for the New Yorker could renew discussion of micro-history and commodity history at Cliopatria. At Chapati Mystery, Sepoy links to an remarkable number of such histories. One could add to his list the work of Mark Smith at the University of South Carolina on the histories of the senses: Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Hearing History: A Reader (University of Georgia Press, 2004). Smith tells us"I'm knee-deep in the ‘field' of sensory history -- a vibrant area of historical inquiry dedicated to examining the roles played by olfaction, hearing, touch, and taste (as well as vision) in shaping the past. My concern is to help restore the full sensory texture of history and examine what the senses in addition to seeing might be able to tell us about historical experience and causation."

I suppose that we should distinguish commodity histories (bookshelves, bread, cheese, chocolate, cocaine, cod, coffee, corn, cotton, hemp, heroine, pencils, potato, salt, screws, spice, sugar, tobacco, vanilla, and, most recently, barbed wire) from other forms of micro-history, whether of the body and its functions (breast, fart, hair, hip, masturbation, penis, sensation, smiling, etc.), numbers (zero, e and pi), or mundane experience (dust, light, night, sound, etc.). As Krystal suggests, much of the existing literature is largely defined by the western experience; and, as Sepoy points out, there is reason to be skeptical about the importance of some of these subjects. But that is often a function of the skill of the historian and others offer a remarkable range of potential insight. The slave trade, after all, is a commodity history; and both it and male/female bonding have complicated relationships with other commodity histories. I imagine that the Cliopatriarchs have a range of attitudes about these micro-histories, but both Tim Burke and Jonathan Reynolds have published commodity history. Tim's pointed out that he finds research in commodity history an especially effective assignment for his students.