An Infinite History

Shortlisted for the American Library in Paris Book Award Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize, McGill University Winner of the PROSE Award in European History, Association of American Publishers Rothschild rightly rejects what she describes as an 'ideological' division of the dead by historians between 'important'- the people with substantial records and 'the unimportant... who can be counted, but cannot be understood'. Rather, as this book demonstrates, a focus on the 'ordinary' can offer new perspectives on periods of extraordinary change. ---Laura O'Brien, Times Literary Supplement [An Infinite History] is a family history unlike any other because of the way Rothschild tells it. . . . By starting with the names and tracing them over space and especially time, Rothschild not only upends the usual methods of study but also compels a rethinking of many prevailing views about the politics, economy, and society of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. ---Lynn Hunt, New York Review of Books The study of human connections has been central to the rich current of scholarship called microhistory, especially as practiced by Italian historians such as Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni. . . . This approach is at the heart of Harvard historian Emma Rothschild's captivating new book, An Infinite History. . . . [The] book still represents one of the most successful attempts to put Ginzburg and Poni's 'science of the lived' into action. ---David A. Bell, The Nation [A] remarkable inquiry into the town of Angouleme, in southwestern France, beginning with the story of 'an inquisitive, illiterate woman, Marie Aymard,' and five generations of her extended family in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the sort of history that has been exceedingly hard to tell, and therefore not often told. * Harvard Magazine * Emma Rothschild leaves no stone unturned in her quest to trace one family through centuries and five generations... this is an inspiring and enjoyable demonstration of what can be achieved by skill, perseverance and a bit of luck. * Family Tree Magazine * This innovative study of ordinary people in a French provincial town is a remarkable achievement of both painstaking research and historical imagination . . . . the result is a fascinating exercise in history from below, a history of chance encounters and social networks, of ambition and opportunity. ---Alan Forrest, Family and Community History