In a 1979 article, Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni presented “microstoria” as a newly successful Italian export that had managed to upset a pattern of French–Italian intellectual trade long weighted in favor of France. Indeed, in the late 1970s and early 1980s the Italian journal Quaderni storici led the way in publishing examples of the new genre, drawing on the richness of the Italian archives. Yet as the material cited above suggests, the use of microhistory in pursuit of the “extraordinary” has perhaps had the greatest influence among American historians eager to engage with a broader reading public, and to reinvent history as a narrative form. Historians such as John Demos, Jonathan Spence, James Goodman and Simon Schama, investigating subjects that range from Qing China to 1930s Alabama, have all treated their works as experiments, not only in historical form, but in narrative style. Goodman told the story of Alabama's “Scottsboro Boys,” black youths whose trial for raping two white women became an American cause célèbre, from multiple perspectives, in an approach that owed something to Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon as well as to more conventional historical narratives.