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Sally McKee, Lisa A. Lindsay. Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 195–196, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.195
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The most frequent charge laid against historians who write microhistories is that they provide insufficient contexts for the multifarious threads that form the story’s weave. This is a bit unfair to microhistory as a genre, since most criticism of written histories in any genre boils down to either factual error or the lack of context. Nevertheless, microhistories have attracted more than their fair share of disparaging comments. The genre’s seemingly narrow focus on an individual or event or community gives the impression that the stories it conveys are small, with limited implications. Perhaps one day, microhistories and their implied antithesis, macrohistories, will be seen as complementary, each genre supplying what the other, by definition, cannot. Microhistory brings into relief the contingent details of broadly conceived historical phenomena; macrohistory provides a vivid backdrop against which the historical episode plays out.
Lisa A. Lindsay’s Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa provides a very good example of the benefits that microhistory can deliver to students of history. Lindsay’s story begins in Camden, South Carolina, in 1840, with the death of a freed man, Scipio Vaughan, and ends a century and a half later, with his descendants in the modern nation of Nigeria. Before he died, Scipio Vaughan enjoined his seven children to abandon the United States for the land of their ancestors. In Africa, he suggested, they were sure to find more opportunities than they found in the U.S. Subsequent to their father’s death, white supremacist terrorism, white “patrons” bilking them of the little real estate they owned, and bad luck convinced Vaughan’s children that their father might have had a good idea. They all committed to emigrating. However, three, perhaps four, of his daughters died in the decade after Scipio Vaughan’s death. Then, put off by news of the toll that malaria and dysentery took on previous groups of emigrants to Liberia, the late daughters’ husbands and the surviving siblings changed their minds. Only one child stuck to the plan. In 1852, James Churchwill Vaughan—known throughout his life as J. C. or Church Vaughan—embarked on a voyage to Liberia, sponsored by the American Colonization Society.
