In Miniatures, Kate Ferris and Huw Halstead have assembled an impressive group of researchers working on modern histories of everyday life. The 28 contributors – and their favourite sources – are drawn from across the globe and represent a remarkable diversity of intellectual and disciplinary backgrounds. The reader builds on the podcast of the same name produced by Ferris and Halstead as part of the Everyday Dictatorship project, funded by the European Research Council from 2018 to 2023. This is the first book in the Exeter Histories of Everyday Life series and the hardback version is a pleasure to read, while the open access version should significantly increase its accessibility to students and independent researchers alike.

The book and its title have clearly been inspired by the German historian Alf Lüdtke (1943–2019), a pioneer in the study of everyday life histories (Alltagsgeschichte). For Lüdtke and subsequent advocates of this approach, the ‘miniatures’ of everyday life that are found in individual and local stories from the past are both valuable in their own right and, with critical reading, provide insights into broader historical themes. The editors’ introduction – ‘Miniature perspectives on big historical themes’ – provides a useful overview of the historiography for students and researchers new to this field. It explores the value of the everyday as an analytical tool for examining the agency and subjectivity of people in the past, the messiness of their experiences and the need for multidirectional analytical scales. The subsequent chapters are loosely structured by source type – initially ego documents such as journals and diaries, followed by oral and archival material, physical objects, audio and visual records, newspapers and magazines and, uniquely, digital sources such as WhatsApp and Google Maps. At the end of the introduction, the editors provide helpful suggestions for alternative routes through the book, recommending groups of chapters for those interested in, for example, histories of childhood, colonialism or the senses. Although the book draws heavily on examples from everyday life under dictatorships, these alternative routes through the reader successfully highlight its impressive thematic diversity.

Although few of the contributors explicitly describe themselves as urban historians, the reader nonetheless provides a thought-provoking contribution to the study of urban history as many authors grapple with the complexities and opportunities involved in analysing urban spaces, processes and experiences. Each chapter is structured so that the source material is presented first (a far from straightforward process in some instances) and the author’s reflections and analysis follow. Many of the sources have emerged from urban settings including, for example, a 1909 handwritten journal from Barcelona (chapter 2), a leftist chant from 1970s Istanbul (chapter 12) and mid-twentieth-century school magazines from Bristol and Cardiff (chapter 23). Other sources speak to urban encounters, including the varied past lives of a green leather jacket in Tübingen (chapter 15) and photographic representations of Balsall Heath residents in 1960s Birmingham (chapter 18). Elsewhere, contributors showcase novel methods for exploring the transformation of urban spaces in the past and the present, including community drawing in the Tajik capital Dushanbe (chapter 22), ethnographic bricolage in the marginal spaces of rapidly transforming Chongqing in China (chapter 13) and the use of Google Maps to understand urban memoryscapes in Lima (chapter 28).

For urban historians and students approaching everyday life histories for the first time, Miniatures introduces an exciting and inspiring diversity of scholars, source materials and analytical approaches. The increasingly urban nature of everyday life during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries means that the reader provides – perhaps unintentionally – a highly effective and eclectic introduction to the study of everyday life in towns and cities at different times across the world. I enjoyed reading the well-crafted and accessible introduction, while the standard structure of subsequent chapters provided a useful consistency to the otherwise highly varied collection of source materials. This eclecticism is undoubtedly a key strength of the book – it not only showcases the messiness of everyday life but also provides an inspiring introduction to the study of everyday life histories. The methodological creativity exhibited by the contributors and assembled by the editors encourages and entices urban historians, including me, to do more to incorporate everyday life histories into their accounts of the modern city and its inhabitants.