Writing trade-list narrative and creative non-fiction involves swapping between the telescope and the microscope at regular intervals. On the one hand, general readers are not looking for the narrow focus and intra-disciplinary debates of an academic monograph. On the other hand, it is through rich, evocative examples of lives, deeds, and dilemmas that these readers can best appreciate what the past can tell us, how, and why we should care.

What opportunities do genres of trade-list narrative/creative history, memoir, and biography offer for telling stories at very large (environmental, multi-century) and very small (biographical, microhistorical) scales? How might scholars navigate the challenges involved? And to what extent are modes of selection, structure, and voice that are atypical in academic writing more effective ways to gain insight and prompt empathy, curiosity and connection?

This roundtable, the second of two linked sessions, will engage these questions by exploring the challenges and opportunities of balancing breadth and granularity in “big ideas” histories of sweeping geographical and/or temporal scope.

Surekha Davies explores ways of structuring a “big ideas” book (a transregional, multi-millenial history of humanity, told through the concept of the monster), to build narrative tension and offer readers a conceptual journey, and to tap into and contribute to themes that are legible (politics, society, science, religion), while offering a new grand narrative with explanatory power. Bathsheba Demuth reflects on how multiple scales are a necessity for environmental histories, and looks at how landscapes and our experiences of them can be used to both narratively and analytically move between scales in ways that connect with readers. Carrie E. Gibson considers what it means to be writing weighty tomes in an era in which readers are reading differently and distractedly: should historians who are drawn to telling a big story think about ways to make it more digestible, and what are the trade-off of doing so? Rebekah E. Pite reflects on her experiences moving between the micro and the macro for different books, and the distinctive strategies of selection needed in each case.