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 (historical materialism), 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%.Diplomatic dropped from 5% to 3%, economic history from 7% to 5%, and cultural history grew from 14% to 16%. Based on full-time professors in US history departments. Stephen H. Haber, David M. Kennedy, and Stephen D. Krasner, "Brothers under the Skin: Diplomatic History and International Relations", International Security, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer, 1997), pp. 34-43 at p. 4 2; online at JSTOR 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%).See "History Online:Teachers of History" accessed 1/21/2014
"Old" social history There is an important distinction between old social history and new social history, which are now subfields 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 (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.E. P. Thompson, "History From Below", The Times Literary Supplement, April 7, 1966.
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 (1852), 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 (especially Great Men), their Protestant moralising and misanthropic tendencies".
What is social history?
There are many definitions of social history, most of which are confined 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 (historical materialism) and the narrower preoccupation with giving voice to the voiceless (justice-seeking) 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, culminating in his last interview, when 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.Staughton Lynd, Doing History From the Bottom Up: On E. P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, and rebuilding the labor movement from below (Haymarket, eBook, 2014). 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 beyond. Georges Lefebvre first used the phrase (history seen from below and not from above) in 1932 when praising Albert Mathiez for seeking to tell the (history of the masses and not of starlets).When the State Trembled 1442660228 Reinhold Kramer, Tom Mitchell - 2010 "It was Lucien Febvre who first used the phrase 'history from below' when in 1932 he observed that Albert Mathiez, a founding member of the Annales tradition, had sought 'histoire des masses et non de vedettes; histoire vue d'en bas en non ..." 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 (1966), which brought the phrase to the forefront of historiography from the 1970s.Black and MacRaild wrote that Thompson's 1966 essay, 'History from below', in the Times Literary Supplement "was the real starting point, not only of the term, but of attempts to define it, to intellectualise about it, and to give it a coherent agenda...." Notably, "History From Below" appeared as the title of the Thompson article, put there by an anonymous editor.Tom Mitchell, "History From Below," Times Literary Supplement, November 24, 2006, 15
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, and 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".Peter Novik, That Noble Dream: The "objectivity question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 443, quoted in C. J. Coventry "Keynes From Below: A Social History of Second World War Keynesian Economics" (2023), Federation University Australia, PhD Thesis, 372. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11419.64802/1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340939637_Keynes_from_Below_A_social_history_of_Second_World_War_Keynesian_economics
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 counterposed with 'History from below'.N. B. Harte, "Trends in publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland, 1925-74." Economic History Review 30.1 (1977): 20-41. online
Thus in the UK social history has often had a strong political impetus, and can be contrasted sharply with traditional history's (partial) documentation of the exploits of the powerful, within limited diplomatic and political spheres, and its reliance on archival sources and methods (see historical method and archive) that exclude the voices of less powerful groups within society. Social history has drawn on a much wider range of sources and methods than traditional history and source criticism, gaining a broader view of the past. Methods have often included quantitative data analysis and, importantly, oral history, which creates an opportunity to glean perspectives and experiences of people within society who are unlikely to be documented in archives. Eric Hobsbawm was an important UK social historian who produced an extensive social history of the UK and also wrote on the theory and politics of UK social history. Hobsbawm 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". It is called "people's 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 (3) connecting the two".1985:P22
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" (Cliometrics), such as Robert Fogel and Douglass North, employed mathematical models and economic data to reinterpret major historical processes. However, this approach was criticized for reducing 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: