Micro-History and YOU

Camera is on Cassidy, who is examing something in the microscope. 

Hey there! I’m glad you came, because I want to show you something! You know about history? Well, I just discovered something so small I HAVE to use this microscope to see it! Oh yeah, come here and take a look!

(Camera cuts to through the microscope)

Look at how small that history is! What do you reckon we should call it? I was thinking something direct like ‘Micro History’

Why is it important? Well-

(Cut to the intro)

In 2021, we were all talking about Bruno. Disney came out with the smash hit, Encanto. 

Encanto is set in Columbia, in the family of The Madrigals, who all have magical powers, except two of them. The Matriarch of the family, Abuela was the creator of the magic, and the main character, Mirabella have no visible powers. 

The source of the family’s magic is a candle created when Abuelas husband sacrificed himself to save young Abuela and the townsfolk from the Men On The Horses(TM)... (whispering: we’ll get to those). The candle has created a house, (who’s alive) as well as serving as a natural sanctuary. The townsfolk are safe here from the outside world. The movie is set about 50 years after the death of Abuela’s husband, and the family has grown to its current size of twelve. 

The movie follows Mirabels journey to fix the main conflict. The house is seemingly getting cracks, slowly breaking, and the magic looks to be fading away. As she progresses, it becomes more and more apparent that the house is fully dying, which reaches a central point in this scene, where Mirabel tells Abulea: 

”He loves this family – I love this family! We all love this family! You’re the one that doesn’t care! You’re the one breaking our home!... The miracle is dying, because of you!”

What follows is Abulea realizing that she had led her anxiety and fears take over her mind, and in that process had cultivated a toxic environment. 

Let me preface with saying, that I do not support the Disney Corporation, and their approach to AI. Today, I will be focusing on the movie itself, and my love goes out to the people at Disney Creative, who wanted to genuinely do a good job and tell a story. I’m sorry your bosses suck.

Encanto is allegedly referencing what in Spanish is called ”Guerra de los Mil Días”, a civil war in Columbia from October 1899 to November 1902. The war was a result of a long standing political conflict between liberalism and conservatism, to quote Professor of History and Literature and Ph.D. in Spanish, Christopher Minster

”The conservatives favored a strong central government, limited voting rights and strong links between church and state. The liberals, on the other hand, favored stronger regional governments, universal voting rights and a division between church and state.” (Minster 2020)

An election in 1898 resulted in the conservative Manuel Antonio Sanclamente achieving presidency, which sparked outrage among the liberals. Manuel Sanclamente had previously in 1861 taken part in a conservative overthrow of the government, which naturally meant claims about voting fraud would grow strong. He struggled to keep his grip on power, and on October 17th, 1899, the liberals began a revolt, leading to a war that lasted for 3 years. The Brittannica describes the time as

”disorganized but highly disruptive guerrilla-style warfare raged in the rural areas, with great destruction of property and loss of life both in combat and from disease” (Britannica, 2025)

Encanto is not the first to reference this war. 

”One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Marquez, is about the fictional town of Macondo run by the family Buendías. The town is mostly cut off from the outside world, and live in peace. However, the patriarch of the family, José Arcadio Buendina, is impulsive and inquisitive. He gives these characters to his sons, one also named José and the other named Aureliano. The impulsiveness leads to contact to other towns, and participation in civil wars, bringing a long reigning chaos to the once peaceful town. 

I don’t wanna go on too long about that book, but I need you to see this line from the Sparknotes: 

”The women, too, range from the outrageously outgoing, like Meme, who once brings home seventy-two friends from boarding school, to the prim and proper Fernanda del Carpio, who wears a special nightgown with a hole at the crotch when she consummates her marriage with her husband.” (Sparknotes, "One Hundred Years of Solitude")

The book’s ending is a dreadful one, with the town falling to ruin.  Let’s get back to the point here. 

When I was growing up, in about 6th or 7th grade or something, we were learning about some of the horrible stuff that had happened in history. We learned about The Plague, in which the school book vividly describes the abscesses bursting on people’s skins... We also learned about Colonization and Slavery.  Something that struck me watching Encanto, and thinking back to history class, was how the victims of history were portrayed. 

During the classes in which we learned about the Colonization and the Human Trafficking of natives from Africa to the Caribbeans, there was for some parts an interesting focus on naming the institutions and people who committed these atrocities. We were learning about the Danish East-Indian Company, and about Columbus, and the Danish captains who experienced life on one of the ships. 

We also learned of one enslaved person, and their story, but the focus was on naming the perpetrators and uncovering the horrible things they did. 

For contrast, in the same school, we were taught about the Copenhagen Bombardment of 1807. This was told through the story of a woman who gave birth during the bombardment, and ALLEGEDLY named her child Raquetta Bombardina. This story is not true.  A quick internet search got me to a blog post from 2007 that links the original story back to a rumor, mentioned in Sophie Thalbitzers ”Grandma’s Memoirs” from 1807. Regardless, the story focused on the Copenhagen citizens, and how they experienced it. I dug up the original and made a rough translation, so you can get see what I’m describing. 

”On a beautiful summer day, night was falling. I, my sister, and some kids sat in the courtyard and played ’the priest and the pulpit.’ By the post sat a man and lady, who were wrenching washed clothes. The Landlords girl was running around, shooing a small dog inside, and a soldier was pumping his rifle barrel clean. Everything was the deepest peace, cozy summer evening peace. Suddenly, a pair of heavy shots were heard. ‘They have begun’ they all yelled, but as we didn’t see the results of the shots, the older people continued their activities calmly. Only us children went after my mother’s directions into the hall. In the meantime, we had hardly gone well in there, before a bomb dropped in the front house, ripped a pair of windows to the yard, and fell not so far away from the people by the post and blew to many pieces. “

”In such way it is told by Thomas Overskou, who as a boy experienced Copenhagen's Bombardment. He lived in the poorhouse, Noah’s Ark, located on Studiestræde No. 8 (Study Street). The Englishmen’s cannons opened fire September 2nd, 1807, at 7.15 pm, and the bombardment lasted till about 7am next morning”

”All over Europe, there was outcry over Copenhagen’s destiny. For the first time, the world experienced that women and kids, sick and old, were the targets of the war’s violence. Time would tell, that it wasn’t the last time, that terror bombardments like that would be used” (Ind i Historien - Bind ???)

The reason I bring this up, is because in Encanto, they handle it in a similar fashion. Note how the perpetrators, the men on the horses are faceless, and that the movie itself doesn’t even focus that much on these people. They’re on screen for about 3 milliseconds, and the movie itself focuses more on the P.O.V. of the Madrigals and the Encanto. 

This type of history, is what historians call Micro History or ‘History from below’

One of the earliest examples of this, is Carlo Ginzberg’s The Cheese and The Worms from 1976, zooming in on the world-view of Domenico Scandella AKA. Mennochio, an Italian miller from the sixteenth century Friuli in north-eastern Italy. The wacky title refers to Domenico’s cosmology, his belief that in the beginning everything was chaos, but then the elements formed like cheese does in milk, and in that mass appeared worms, who became angels. 

Peter Burke says in ‘What is Cultural History’ (which I have read for actual homework):

”Since the 1970s, hundreds of micro-historical studies have been published, focusing on villages and individuals, families and convents, riots, murders and su*cides. Their variety is impressive, but it is likely that these studies are subject to the law of diminishing intellectual returns to a given approach. The great problem is to analyze the relation between the community and the world outside it."

Encanto, though it is fiction, is a great example of this. It recognizes that historical events can be experienced differently by ‘regular’ people, and that historical events are a part of, but not necessarily the entirety, of a person’s reality. The civil war is only among one of the problems they face. For the Madrigals, the civil war is not about Liberals vs. Conservatives, it’s first and foremost about safety. The historical event becomes the premise, but not the focus, of the movie. 

Not that this is new, but as the last 50 years, historians have revolutionized our field, so has the narrative that Disney is known for. As a historian, I can find a princess story like Cinderella amusing, but I have also studied elements of the European Monarchy, and I know how fake the glamour and wealth was. They were able to have pretty castles like that, because of what was basically a royalist version of fascist feudalism, keeping the majority of the people in the county working to death in the fields with no say in the matter. Encanto is able to exist, because scholars and activist have fought for DECADES to decolonize and un-elitizize academia and media. I want to make it very clear that Disney is in no way Paving The Way of anything here, they are simply threading water that is finally safe enough for them to take the investment risk. 

So yeah, Encanto is – to me – a form of Micro-History, and that’s pretty neat. 

Thank you for watching.