Please join us for the keynote lecture of the international workshop Microhistory and Jewish Experience in Central, East-Central, and Eastern Europe. Curtis Murphy will present his work “Pursuing the Archival White Rabbit: Reflections on Several Research Detours into Microhistory and Jewish History” at 12:00pm EDT/18:00 CET.

Microhistorical studies often originate from a serendipitous discovery in the archives, when a researcher pursuing an altogether separate scholarly agenda happens upon a trove of unusually rich documents, which either present a compelling story or illuminate social reality in an unexpected manner. Such a discovery, like Alice’s White Rabbit, beckons us to alter course and pursue a new, potentially lengthy path of research. Should we always follow this WhiteRabbit? This talk presents the results of three such discoveries, all of which occurred during research into the socio-political history of towns in eighteenth-century Poland-Lithuania. The first discovery completely reconceptualized my understanding of civic republican attitudes and the relationship between various urban groupings, including the urban magistracy and the kahal. The second discovery led me to an exceedingly lengthy investigation, which after much reworking, became an article but nothing more, and the third, though promising, has remained unused to this day. These cases may suggest the potentially diminishing returns of archival serendipity, but their various fates also call into question the utility of microhistory absent a means of anchoring individual cases into larger conceptual frameworks.