Social history
Social history, often called "history from below", is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians. Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, with some arguing that its origins lie over a century earlier.
"History from below" redirects here. For the Delta Spirit album, see History from Below (album).In its "golden age" it was a major field in the 1960s and 1970s among young historians, and still is well represented in history departments in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and the United States. In the two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history rose from 31% to 41%, while the proportion of political historians fell from 40% to 30%.[1] In the history departments of British and Irish universities in 2014, of the 3410 faculty members reporting, 878 (26%) identified themselves with social history while political history came next with 841 (25%).[2]
"Old" social history[edit]
There is an important distinction between old social history and new social history that exists in what are now sub-fields of social history that predate the 1960s. E. P. Thompson identified labour history as the central concern of new social historians because of its "Whiggish narritives", such as the term "labour movement" which erroneously suggests the constant progression toward the perfect future.[3] The older social history included numerous topics that were not part of mainstream historiography, which was then political, military, diplomatic, constitutional history, the history of great men and intellectual history. It was a hodgepodge without a central theme, and it often included political movements, such as populism, that were "social" in the sense of being outside the elite system.
The emergence of "new" social history[edit]
The popular view is that new social history emerged in the 1960s with the publication of Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Writing in 1966 in The Times Literary Supplement, Thompson described his approach as "history from below" and explained that it had come from earlier developments within the French Annales School.[4]
According to C. J. Coventry, new social history arose in the 1930s at the University of Cambridge with the Communist Party Historians Group.[3] Citing the reflections of Eric Hobsbawm, a contemporary of Thompson's and a fellow member of the Historians' Group, Coventry shows that the "new" social history popularly associated with Thompson's "history from below" was in fact a conscious revival of historical materialism by young British Marxist intellectuals under the tutelage of the Cambridge economist Maurice Dobb. As such, the foundational text of social history is Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), which is marked by its society-wide approach and consideration of everyday peoples. It was not until the 1960s, however, that social history gained popularity and scholarship flourished. This was when "social history truly came into being, with historians reflecting on their aristocratic and middle-class preoccupations, their veneration of elites (especially Great Men), their Protestant moralising and misanthropic tendencies".[3]
Political history[edit]
While the study of elites and political institutions has produced a vast body of scholarship, the impact after 1960 of social historians has shifted emphasis onto the politics of ordinary people—especially voters and collective movements. Political historians responded with the "new political history," which has shifted attention to political cultures. Some scholars have recently applied a cultural approach to political history.[80] Some political historians complain that social historians are likely to put too much stress on the dimensions of class, gender and race, reflecting a leftist political agenda that assumes outsiders in politics are more interesting than the actual decision makers.[81]
Social history, with its leftist political origins, initially sought to link state power to everyday experience in the 1960s. Yet by the 1970s, social historians increasingly excluded analyses of state power from its focus.[82] Social historians have recently engaged with political history through studies of the relationships between state formation, power and everyday life with the theoretical tools of cultural hegemony and governmentality.[83]