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, spreading from schools of thought in the United Kingdom and France which posited that the Great Man view of history was inaccurate because it did not adequately explain how societies changed. Instead, social historians wanted to show that change arose from within society, complicating the popular belief that powerful leaders were the source of dynamism. While social history came from the Marxist view of history, the cultural turn and linguistic turn saw the number of sub-fields expand as well as the emergence of other approaches to social history, including a social liberal approach and a more ambiguous critical theory approach.
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%. In the history departments of British and Irish universities in 2014, of the 3410 faculty members reporting, 878 identified themselves with social history while political history came next with 841.
"Old" social history
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 narratives", such as the term "labour movement" which, he says, erroneously suggests the constant progression toward the perfect future. 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
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. 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.According to C. J. Coventry, new social history arose in the 1930s at the University of Cambridge with the Communist Party Historians Group. 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. If so, the foundational text of social history is Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which is marked by its society-wide approach and consideration of everyday people. It was not until the 1960s, however, that social history gained popularity and scholarship flourished. This was when, according to Thompson, "social history truly came into being, with historians reflecting on their aristocratic and middle-class preoccupations, their veneration of elites, their Protestant moralising and misanthropic tendencies".
What is social history?
There are many definitions of social history, most of them isolated to national historiographies. The most consequential definition of social history is the one Thompson provided. Thompson saw his "history from below" approach as an attempt to reveal the "social nexus" through which broadscale change occurs. This is reflective of his historical materialism. However, Thompson's 1963 book was disproportionately concerned with the lived experience of forgotten or everyday people. The disparity between a society-wide approach and the narrower preoccupation with giving voice to the voicesless is the basis of present-day confusion about the definition of social history. The confusion arose from Thompson's own inner political turmoil. Staughton Lynd sees Thompson's career as a gradual departure from Marxism until, in his last interview, he declined to describe himself as a Marxist. Where Thompson had said he did not believe in "theory with a capital T" and Marxism, Lynd shows that Thompson's departure was actually much more gradual, beginning with the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. The highly influential, but confused, definition used by Thompson was not resolved in part because of the cultural turn and the decline of Marxism on the left in the 1970s and 1980s."History from below" phraseology
The popular phrase "history from below" used in social history first arose in French scholarship before spreading to British scholarship and then elsewhere. Georges Lefebvre first used the phrase "histoire vue d'en bas et non d'en haut" in 1932 when praising Albert Mathiez for seeking to tell the "histoire des masses et non de vedettes". The phrase "people's history" was first used in the title of British historian A. L. Morton's 1938 book, A People's History of England. Yet it was E. P. Thompson's essay History from Below in The Times Literary Supplement which brought the phrase to the forefront of historiography from the 1970s. Notably, "History From Below" appeared as the title of the Thompson article, put there by an anonymous editor.The popular phrase has been criticised for implying that social history is overly concerned with the views of insignificant people when it is precisely concerned with how the masses influence events, not just "Great Men". However, society lost its class consciousness in the late 1970s and early 1980s, social history shed its historical materialism. In the words of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, post-Marxist social history became concerned with "the bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens of each one’s favourite victims".
Social history in national contexts
British and Irish social history
Social history is associated in the United Kingdom with the work of E. P. Thompson in particular, and his studies The Making of the English Working Class and Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. Emerging after the second world war, it was consciously opposed to traditional history's focus on 'great men', which it counter-posed with 'History from below'.Thus in the UK social history has often had a strong political impetus, and can be contrasted sharply with traditional history's documentation of the exploits of the powerful, within limited diplomatic and political spheres, and its reliance on archival sources and methods that exclude the voices of less powerful groups within society. Social history has used a much wider range of sources and methods than traditional history and source criticism, in order to gain a broader view of the past. Methods have often including quantitative data analysis and, importantly, oral history which creates an opportunity to glean perspectives and experiences of those people within society that are unlikely to be documented within archives. Eric Hobsbawm was an important UK social historian, who has both produced extensive social history of the UK, and has written also on the theory and politics of UK social history. Hobsbawn and E. P. Thompson were both involved in the pioneering History Workshop Journal and Past & Present.
Ireland has its own historiography.
American social history
In United States historiography, history from below is referred to as "history from the bottom-up" and is called "peoples history", associated in popular consciousness with Howard Zinn and his 1980 book A People's History of the United States. Charles Tilly argues the tasks of the social historian are 1) "documenting large structural changes; 2) reconstructing the experiences of ordinary people in the course of those changes; and connecting the two".The intellectual foundations of the “history from below” approach were further shaped by post–World War II developments. During the Cold War years, historians increasingly adopted quantitative methods, applying social-scientific models to the study of voter behavior, social mobility, and economic trends. This era witnessed the rise of the so-called “social science history,” which sought to render historical inquiry systematic and analytical. Within this context, the proponents of the “New Economic History”, such as Robert Fogel and Douglass North, employed mathematical models and economic data to reinterpret major historical processes. However, this approach was criticized for its tendency to reduce complex human experiences to numerical expressions. The founding of the Social Science History Association in 1976 marked a decisive institutionalization of this methodological orientation.
Americanist Paul E. Johnson recalls the heady early promise of the movement in the late 1960s:
The Social Science History Association was formed in 1976 to bring together scholars from numerous disciplines interested in social history. It is still active and publishes Social Science History quarterly. The field is also the specialty of the Journal of Social History, edited since 1967 by Peter Stearns It covers such topics as gender relations; race in American history; the history of personal relationships; consumerism; sexuality; the social history of politics; crime and punishment, and history of the senses. Most of the major historical journals have coverage as well.
From the 1960s onward, social history expanded its scope beyond structural and economic analyses to include questions of identity and culture. The civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and the Vietnam War prompted historians to reconsider grand narratives and to focus instead on the everyday experiences of marginalized groups. Analytical categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, and lifestyle emerged as central to historical inquiry. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America was rediscovered as a pioneering work in this regard. By the 1980s, the “linguistic turn” and postmodern debates had drawn attention to the narrative and discursive dimensions of history. Scholars such as Joan Scott and William Sewell emphasized the constitutive role of language and discourse in shaping social reality.
However, after 1990 social history was increasingly challenged by cultural history, which emphasizes language and the importance of beliefs and assumptions and their causal role in group behavior.