It would be hard to miss the spate of books in recent years on such everyday topics as chairs, pencils, paper clips, longitude, cod, salt, potatoes, rhubarb, dust, dirt, and germs. Books like these resist easy classification and yet arguably constitute a distinct genre of history. Surprisingly, this publishing phenomenon has received little notice among historians, and almost equally remarkable it has not agreed upon name.

Historically Speaking editor Donald Yerxa, who encouraged me to write this essay, quickly waved off my initial suggestion to dub the new genre microhistory. He pointed out that it would be confused with the contemporary Italian school of history that also goes by that name and with the work of other Western historians who depict a whole epoch, a society, or a culture on the basis of an individual life, and particular village, or a single incident. In turn, I was equally quick to reject his suggestion to call it concept history. This term seemed to ignore the materiality--"the thingness"--which I associated with the new genre and I took to be its tie to inventions, technology, design, machines, plants, commodities, chemicals, germs, diseases, and other common and everyday, small, and invisible things.

Calling the genre "the history of great and mighty little things" would not be far off the mark: readers are introduced to such things as the elevator that allowed the building of skyscrapers and the transformation of the city; weapons and materials that won wars; technologies that penetrate, supplement, and repair our bodies, and enhance our imaginations; foods that defined peoples demographically and culturally; and epidemics, plagues, and blights that changed the course of civilizations. Writing history as the biography of "mighty minute things" seems altogether appropriate to this epoch of atom, cell, and gene, in which the detective story is the preferred literature. And I confess that by putting an accent on materiality as a first condition for inclusion in the new genre I fly my own banner. In my recent Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible and forthcoming On Foot: A History of Walking, I stress the determining influence of concrete things. I emphasize in the latter such things as the creation of smooth surfaces, the control of water and light, the manipulation of new materials, the spread of the horse, the growth of public transportation, and the continued substitution of wheels for feet.

So I have chosen as a working name for this genre, "the history of things" or "histories of everything." It is hard to think of a thing--be it an animal, plant, or machine--which a curious historian couldn't artfully turn into a readable, if not exciting, piece of work fraught with connections and implications as important as they are unsuspected. Of course, just because a thing is curious and overlooked doesn't mean it should be included in the new genre.

In search of answers, I sought out scholars who I thought would have some insights into the history of things. In fact, the first such conversation occurred about fifteen years ago in Paris. I sat across from one of France's most innovative historians of regional and everyday life, Guy Thuillier. Speaking in near machine gun-like fashion, he concluded a list of "what there should be a history of" with the exclamation that there should be a history of dust. With that single sentence, he condemned me to several years of research. Indeed, he transformed what had heretofore been a propensity of mine to advocate and write "off-beat" histories into a ruling dictum.

In recent months, I spoke to Eugen Weber, who, by the way, had initially directed me to Thuillier and had actually started me in this direction in a post-doctoral seminar at UCLA back in 1975-76. Reading Weber's pathbreaking Peasants into Frenchmen in manuscript pointed me to the themes of everyday life and popular culture, which were already on display in several chapters of his Modern History of Europe (1971). They were elaborated in following decades by his prolific writing on rural and urban modern French history. When I asked Weber this past January about the motives behind histories of everything, he put boredom at the top of the list. The array of topics offered by the history of things, according to Weber, offers a holiday from the well-treated, hence worn topics of standard political, social, and cultural histories. The history of everything, he suggested, fits those curious historians who like to open fresh doors and look around. For example, Weber mentioned that one's first look into a mirror-the subject of a new book by Sabine Melchior-Bonnet-makes a person, if not a new creature, a being with a new self!

Peter Stearns, editor of The Journal of Social History and author of books on such a wide array of topics as anger, anxious parents, and fatness, echoed Weber in a recent interview. He sees the history of things as an outgrowth of social history, which broadened our interest in everyday conditions, life, and expression.

Explaining the importance of subject selection for success in the new genre, anthropologist Sydney Mintz opined in another telephone conversation in February, 2004, that all topics don't work equally well. In his classic Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985) Mintz set the standard for the history of plants and crops. He studied the transformation of sugar from spice to a worldwide commodity and its migration across civilizations, societies, classes, and cultures. Putting it in a global perspective (which arguably the best histories of things require), Mintz turned his history of sugar into a compelling narrative of world connections. What appears as his fortuitous choice of sugar-rather than, say, milk, saffron, ketchup, rhubarb, or popcorn-actually grew out of his decades-long study of Caribbean society and sugar's paramount place in it. In fact, it arose out of his first study of the life of a single Puerto Rican worker (described in his Worker in the Cane, 1974). Exploring such profound poles of human experience as human taste, work, leisure, and celebration, Mintz's Sweetness and Power establishes a powerful link between the dichotomous joy of tasting sugar and the slavery accompanying its production. With his more recent Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom (1996), Mintz extended his interest to the history of food, a staple-pardon the pun-of the history of things.

Historian Larry Zuckerman told me that he wrote The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World (1999) in response to a single question. Eating the traditional potato pancakes at a Hanukkah meal, he asked himself how did Old World people become so dependent on this single New World plant? Zuckerman's narrative explains how Europeans came to adopt and build their lives on the indigenous South American plant, which at first was only welcomed into Europe's ornamental and herb gardens. The potato, whose fruit was hidden below earth, initially appeared to Europe's population as an ugly, bizarre, and distasteful plant. But the potato allowed the reclamation of wasteland, and it would grow in most soils. It required less labor than other crops; in the old order a calorie saved is a calorie earned. Furthermore, it "fit a culture in which people stretched every resource, buying only what they couldn't make or raise."

From my interviews with Mintz and Zuckerman (in addition to what I learned from writing a history of the Jerusalem artichoke), I am convinced that every major plant, crop, food, domestic animal, insect, and microorganism-be it horse, cow, camel, honeybee, or the AIDS virus-offers a potential subject for the imaginative practitioner of this new genre. With influential "biographies" of plagues, diseases, and germs and our battles against them, historians have made it apparent that the plight of societies and civilizations often turned on small but devastating culprits. Bookshelves now fill with books detailing the story of battles against unseen enemies.

Indeed, the history of things focuses on the powers of small, often invisible, and usually unnoticed things to determine everyday life and the very course of societies and civilizations. Consider, for example, the work of historian and engineer Henry Petroski, whose books include The Pencil, The Book on the Bookshelf, The Evolution of Useful Things, and his most recent, Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design (2003). When I interviewed him, he stressed that histories of small things-be they paper cups, paper bags, water pitchers, or chairs-reveal the extraordinary that exists in the ordinary.

Perhaps contemporary historians have a special responsibility to write histories of things, especially small and invisible things. Indeed, if we are to write of human power, we must write not just of great and grandiose matters but of vital and deadly microscopic things. Increasingly, as I argued in Dust, human fate turns on the atom, molecule, cell, gene, and microscopic engineering.

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As a genre, the history of things (or the histories of everything) can be seen as a gathering of sundry historiographical tries. ON one level, it appears to be an overflow from social history, particularly with its concern for domestic and everyday life. It also can be conceptualized as a superabundance of cultural history, with its focus on the material things that determine human belief, behavior, and socialization. But I would argue this genre has another of its sources in the recent expansion of environmental and ecological history. Concentrating on the relationship between the natural and the historical, it directs our attention to the determining roles of plants, animals, crops, land use, agricultural practices and technologies, along with the causative and elemental power of climate, soils, water, rivers, and fire on human landscape. Reconfirming the materiality of history, environmental historians often propose an underlying and governing energy equation between all human and natural things and the importance of technology in transforming environments.

Collectively, historians writing in this genre are revitalizing history by forging new, if not stunning, marriages of facts, anecdotes, ideas, concepts, and ideas. Their work proceed on fresh perspectives and unexpected connections. They have at least the potential to remove obtuse explanations and impenetrable historiographical debates from their narratives, allowing vivid details, telling anecdotes, precise connections, and keen wits to trump theory and ideology.

Although not always pure in practice and admittedly more appropriate fro certain subjects than others, the history of things moves us into everyday life. Not forgetful of Cinderella among the ashes or the truism that not every shoe fits every foot, historians writing the history of things must utilize a flexible causality. Tracing connections between crafts and classes and across landscapes and environments, this genre welcomes everything under the sun into its consideration.

The history of things, to guess at its future, will not consolidate itself into a formal school or an established curriculum. Its sources and motives are too diverse; its subjects and methodologies are too numerous, if not eccentric. Its embrace of novelty, no doubt, invites those who cherish cleverness and book sales over scholarship. Nevertheless, at the same time, it will provide fresh topics and approaches. It will give a deserved place to the history of science, technology, engineering, design, and the landscape, which is fitting in this era or moral and social subjects. It will also leaven economic, business, family, local, and regional history. Negating abstract ideologies and uniform and governing explanations, enhance the flexibility of our causalities, and meet Jacques Barzun's prescription for good history by joining "Narrative, Chronology, Concreteness, and Memorability." Finally, with its accent on details, precise connections, and contextual accuracy, the history of things will leave us, as any good narrative should, trembling before the power of the common and ordinary, the small and invisible, to write human destinies.

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