Social History

Many historians contributed to what is now social history before the mid-20th century, but as a field social history was increasingly precisely defined beginning in the 1930s in France (as part of the Annales school), and from the 1960s in the English-speaking world. (Indeed, for several decades the field seemed so innovative that it was regularly termed the “new” social history.) The field has two foci. First, social history emphasizes large numbers of people in the past, rather than just elites or leading individuals. Common categories include social classes, Gender, Race and ethnic group, and age. Social historians see the history of ordinary people as contributing greatly to an understanding of the past, and often they argue that ordinary people display more independent initiative than was commonly assumed by conventional historians. Often some tension emerges between a focus on groups of ordinary people as targets of mistreatment and the claims of more active agency. Second, and closely linked originally to the focus on ordinary people, social historians analyze a variety of aspects of human and social behavior. They reject the tendency of conventional historians to concentrate heavily on formal politics, diplomacy, and great ideas alone. This aspect of social history has expanded steadily. It leads to a host of subfields, including family and childhood, leisure and consumerism, health and disease, and crime, and the list continues to grow as historians respond to changing social patterns and needs. Some tension has developed between interest in a wider range of topics and the earlier commitment to ordinary people, as some new topics are best explored, at least initially, through elite or middle-class sources. Social history’s topical range has also fueled complaints about a lack of overall coherence, though social historians frequently organize their many topics around major developments like industrialization. Many historians identified themselves strongly as social historians during the early decades of the field’s emergence. This singular identification has softened over time, and many historians in the early 21st century “do” social history as part of a larger commitment, usually to a geographical region. Social history has also drawn different levels of attention in various world regions. The field is better developed, for example, in China or the West than in the Middle East. Finally, social historical work has often, but not always, developed with some interdisciplinary connections, particularly to historical sociology.