1. What is Social History?

What is Social History?

1. Social history as a specialized sub-discipline concentrating on social structures, processes, and actions in a specific sense (inequality, mobility, classes, strata, ethnicity, gender relations, urbanization, work and life of different types of people, not just elites), in contrast to other sub-disciplines like economic history, contitutional history or the history of ideas

2. Social history as a specific approach to or way of looking on general history, by stressing broad structures and processes as well as those dimensions of historical reality emphasized by social history in sense (1.)

Social history as “New History”

• 1960s-70s: a new field of history challenging traditional historiography

• A field of history that looks at the:

  • lived experience of the past

  • social structures and processes

  • entire society from a sociological viewpoing

• Critical with the dominant historiographic discourse, concerned with politics, events, great persons

Social Scientific Paradigm

• Borrowing theories and methods from social sciences and sources

• Origins of social sciences and history: Weber, Marx

• Main topics involve class, family, (welfare) state

Methodological Issues

1. Structural continuities and change - mental, social

2. Sociological theories of change

3. Quantification, mostly descriptive, simple correlations

4. Social history explains politics

Limitations:

• Methodological nationalism: national exceptions as normal

• Historical material vs. Current social science

• Empirics and quantification

Impossible to understand the present without looking at the history and the past of social history and sociology.
Social sciences tries to use the existing data to proceed with a specific research in within social histories; large amounts of data that’s statistically analysed to find specific historical sources.
This contains registers of:

• Property, tax, religion, culture, housing → compiled into large databases

Social History after the Cultural Turn

• Rejects social history’s structural approach

  • Constructivism

  • Non-material inequalities (stereotypes, grouping, etc.)

• Social histories of:

  • Communication, media, language

  • Memory, myths, symbols, rituals

  • Values, norms, social models

  • Identities, ethnicities, sociality, alterity

  • Women

  • Migration, hybrid societies

  • Consumptionism

  • Religion

• New methodology:

  • Discourse

  • Language

  • Debates

• Constructivism

• Broadening of the social, a new totality (?)

• Interdisciplinarity extended — anthropology, ethnography

• New approach to theory “théorie conréte”

  • Inductive theorizing

• New scales — microhistory

Social History VS. Traditional Paradigm

Social History:

• Examination of a greater variety of evidence is needed

• Collective movements/actions taken into account

• Considers the diversity of viewpoints, queries the existence of one true history

• History is more concerned with the analysis of structures

• Concerned with “history from below” (views of ordinary people, popular culture)

• Concerned with virtually every human activity (“everything has a history”); children, family, climate, death, transportation, etc.

Traditional Paradigm:

• History is essentially concerned with politics (state, church, national level)

• History is a narrative of events

• History is based on the documents (=official records)

• Histories are explained by the intention of the (important) individuals

• Offers a “view from above” (concentrated on the great deeds of great men)

• History is objective, the historians task is to give readers “the facts” (Leopold Von Ranke: “How it actually happened”)

• History is essentially a narrative of events

New History aims for…

• New History (social history as a mode of interpretation) — focuses on structures instead of explaining changes through events

• it aims at understanding history in its totality (“histoire totale”) — but after abandoning structures, it struggles with fragmentation

• It places individuals back into the “texture” of society — but often concieves individuals as captives of structures

• Formerly excluded ages, people, regions — becoming the subject of historical investigation

• Instead of description, new history aims at understanding (individual & collective motivations, relations within society)

• The ever new approach necessitates new methods and sources

Achievements and Difficulties of New History

• Relationships with social sciences remained one-sided (concepts, methods)

• “New History” has to cope with its own problems (definitions, sources, methods, explanation)

• The discipline has become fragmented (instead of reaching “total history” it resulted in “histoire en miettes” (history in pieces)

• Today. institutionalization is finished, but there’s no general, dominant theory to organise social history writing

France — The Annales School

First generation:

• University of strasbourg

• 1929: annales l’histoire économique et sociale

• New focus point of research: structures in society (Marc Bloch 1886 - 1944, Lucien Febvre 1876 - 1956)

Second generation:

• 1975: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociale, Paris (EHESS)

• Programme: “histoire totale” — the “trinity” of: economy-society-mentalities (Fernand Braudei 1902-1985, Ernest Labrousse 1895 - 1988)

Focuses on:

• Late medieval and early modern Europe

• Structures (geogrephical, material and of mentalities) instead of events

• Interdisciplinarity (social sciences: economics, psychology, anthropology); literature, arts, geography, etc.

  • borrowing concepts and methods

• New order of historical time (F. Braudel)

  • short term: history of events

  • medium term: cycles, conjunctures

  • long term: longue durée; examines extended periods of time and draw conclusions from historical trend

Germany — The Bielefelt School

• University of Bielefeld, 1969

• Historical Social Science

• Applying sociological and political theories to understand German history f the 19th and 20th century

• Journal: Geischte und Gesellschaft (1975 -)

• Critical studies:

  • Dialogue with political theory, sociology, literary science: focuses on social conflicts, conflicts of state and society; put great emphasis on hermeneutic undestanding

Britain — Social History

• 1950-60s, Marxist (Comm. Party historians group), with economic history (social history society, 1976) BUT within history departments (not indep.)

• Journal: Past & Present (1952)

• History from beloew — E.P. Thompson: The Makng of the English Working Class (63)

• Total history of the modern world — Eric Hobsabawm (17 — 2012): social banditry, crime (resistance involving behavior that by law is illegal but is supported by wider “oppressed” societ as being moral and acceptable: piracy, street gangs, organized crime)

• Harold Perkin (26-2004), first professor in social history (67, Lancaster), founder of Social History Society (76): professionalization, history of transport

• Asa Briggs (21- 2016): social history of media, history of broadcasting