A historian’s task is to separate the wheat from the chaff, put their nose to the grindstone, and read against the grain. I didn’t realize how literal those aphorisms could be.

I was nose-deep in an eighteenth-century mill owner’s account book. Nearing the end of my first year of graduate school, I was fueled by far too much caffeine, hastily flipping through pages of itemized tables of names and numbers hoping to find records of enslaved and Native people, by reading “against the grain.”

As I pushed on, a tiny speck fell from the pages, tumbling onto the table. I assumed it was debris, and I nearly swiped it away. I had only allotted an hour for this source; I couldn’t afford distractions!

Edward Livingston Papers, C0280 Box 125, Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Photo by author.

Instead, I looked closer. The flake was very small, dark brown, oblong, a ridge down the middle. It wasn’t just debris. My fingers clattered across my keyboard as I quickly Googled to confirm: I had just encountered an actual grain of wheat, wedged between the account book pages since the 1770s.

This tiny little grain survived all this time? This tiny capsule of life, narrowly escaping a flour-y fate, preserved between the pages of an account book? A remnant of something that lived and died centuries before I was born, something that passed through the hands of those long gone. I felt a rush of exhilaration.

But then I realized: of course a grain of wheat would have fallen between the pages. It was from a mill—wheat was probably spilling over the place. I should have been surprised there wasn’t more. Just a few pages back, I read the records of tenant farmers paying their rent in wheat! But it hadn’t clicked. The more I thought about it, I realized that I don’t know much about milling wheat, and . . . wait, how does a mill even work again? All of a sudden, I felt silly. How could I have been reading this source without really, consciously understanding its function and its context? I hadn’t even known what a grain of wheat looked like before I searched it on Google!

I grappled with this dissonance as I twiddled the seed between my fingers. How fitting is it that, while so engrossed in reading against the grain, I had to stumble across an actual grain to remind myself about what I was looking at?

I stayed up late that night, captivated by the Wikipedia page about eighteenth-century mill technology. It sparked a whole new set of questions. Who wrote the account book? How did they transport all this grain? Was this lone grain the result of a transaction that ended in a terrible spill? Hopefully not a tenant trying to pay their rent wheat!

I won’t be answering these questions in my dissertation. Ultimately, the whole experience was the very distraction I was attempting to avoid. Sometimes, historians need ruthless efficiency; we can’t obsess over every grain of wheat. But it reminded me to pause and—among the complicated questions of race, class, identity, and oppression—consider everyday life, and its equally nuanced yet overlooked details that make history come alive in surprising ways.