One of the very first things you will learn in History at undergraduate level is that there are many different sub-disciplines within the discipline of analysing History, and you will at some point need to focus and zoom in to certain topics in order to have a better argument. Therefore I will explain to you the different categories of historiography in multiple posts.
In this post, I will be focusing on Social History. So what actually is social history, how did it emerge and develop, and do we still need social history?
Main themes:
- Long term trends and structures
- Daily life rather than isolated events
- An interest in material conditions
- Group behaviours and interactions
- History from below
Emergence of social history:
Marxist theory:
- Model of social structure – 3 tier structure (productive forces, relations of production, political and ideological superstructure) – a functional explanation
- Early 20th century – majority historiography communist states and Soviet bloc
- Also influences western Europe in post-war period
Annales:
- ‘Annales d’histoire economique et sociale’ founded 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch
- Concerned with long term forces and patterns, long term social change
- Politically engaged, firmly anti-bourgeois
- Not interested in state as an institution
- Work commissioned from hand-picked experts
- Pointedly interdisciplinary in approach
- From 1960s, increasingly preoccupied with quantification
Development:
Social historians mid-C20 Britain:
- Eric Hobshawn
- Dorothy Thompson
- E.P. Thompson – wrote ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ (1963)
- Raphael Samuel – founded History Workshop Journal 1976, taught at Ruskin College, social reformer and activist, one of principal promoters of history from below
Characteristics of British social history:
- Interested in periodisation and change
- Tends (initially) to be focused on revolution, on conflict and class struggle
- Moves to look at how changes understood in contemporary consciousness
- Interested in popular social movements and in unrest
- Looking at peasant activism in medieval and modern Europe
- Tends to be celebratory of working classes
Women’s history:
- Focus on history of women increased from 60s/70s
- Impetus from second wave feminism, civil rights and movements for equality, and from left wing history movement
- Shares preoccupations of social history: demography and reconstruction of social lives, therefore family, marriage, childbirth and birth rates
Subdivisions of social history:
- Demographic history
- History of the family
- Urban history
- Agricultural history
Do we still need social history?
- Social history introduced and encouraged radicalism, interdisciplinarity, theoretical models and an idea of the public responsibility of the historian
- Still very important as it focuses on: how structural change happens, especially long-term change; history from below – people at centre; casts a broader net for evidence and asks different questions of that evidence