Both total history and microhistory emerged out of history's complex relationship with the social sciences, yet paradoxically, both also embodied a desire to move away from social science and to recapture something of history's initial vocation as an expressive art form. Total history admittedly enjoyed its great vogue at the moment of the profession's most intense engagement with quantification in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet the breathtaking ambition of leaping from the scattered traces found in archives and libraries to the “totality” of past human existence demanded impressive efforts of the imagination as well as of the calculator. Works like Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean derived their power not only from the statistics their authors marshaled, but from poetic evocations of the living landscape – “the half-wild mountains, where man has taken root like a hardy plant,” the desert's “devouring landscape, like the ‘unharvested sea’ of Homer… Immensity and emptiness: poverty and destitution