Social history
Social history, sometimes described as the 'history of the people', or 'history from below', emerged as an alternative to conventional political history, both in terms of its objects of interest and its belief in deeprooted economic and social factors as agents of historical change. Social and economic history have always overlapped, and in the inter-war years the LSE promoted the growth of both. Following the Second World War the subject expanded greatly, most notably through the work of Edward Thompson, and social and economic history departments proliferated. More recently social history has had to adapt in the face of challenges to its epistomology, especially from postmodernists attacking its continued reliance on class-based forms of analysis.
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- Historians:
- Briggs, Asa
Hill, John Edward Christopher
Hilton, Rodney Howard
Hobsbawm, Eric J.
Joyce, Patrick
Laslett, Thomas Peter Ruffell
Perkin, Harold
Power, Eileen
Samuel, Raphael Elkan
Thirsk, Joan
Thomas, Keith Vivian
Thompson, Edward Palmer - Institutions:
- Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure
Centre for the Study of Social History
Communist Party Historians Group
Economic History Society
Social History Society
Past and Present
- Themes:
- Economic history
History from below
History of education
Labour history
Oral history
Women's history
Related publications
- Peter Borsay, 'New approaches to social history : myth, memory and place: Monmouth and Bath 1750–1900', Journal of Social History (Spring 2006), 867–89
Miles Fairburn, Social History : Problems, Strategies and Methods (Basingstoke, 1999)
Anthony Fletcher, '"englandpast.net": a framework for the social history of England', Historical Research, 75 (2002), 296–315
Patrick Joyce, 'The end of social history?', Social History, 20, 1 (1995), 73–92
Christopher Kent, 'Victorian social history : post-Thompson, post-Foucault, postmodern', Victorian Studies, 40, 1 (1996), 97–133
Harold Perkin, 'Social History in Britain', Journal of Social History, 10, 2 (Winter 1976), 129–43
James Vernon, 'Who's afraid of the linguistic turn? The politics of social history and its discontents', Social History, 19, 1 (1994), 81–97
Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570–1920 and its Interpretation, ed. Adrian Wilson (Manchester, 1993)
