A third generation was led by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929–2023) and includes Jacques Revel,[2] and Philippe Ariès (1914–1984), who joined the group in 1978.
The main scholarly outlet has been the journal Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale ("Annals of Economic and Social History"), founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, which broke radically with traditional historiography by insisting on the importance of taking all levels of society into consideration and emphasized the collective nature of mentalities.
Scholars moved in multiple directions, covering in disconnected fashion the social, economic, and cultural history of different eras and different parts of the globe.
By the time of the crisis the school was building a vast publishing and research network reaching across France, Europe, and the rest of the world.
The emphasis is on social history, and very long-term trends, often using quantification and paying special attention to geography[9] and to the intellectual world view of common people, or "mentality" (mentalité).
Instead the Annales focused attention on the synthesizing of historical patterns identified from social, economic, and cultural history, statistics, medical reports, family studies, and even psychoanalysis.
The goal of the Annales was to undo the work of the Sorbonnistes, to turn French historians away from the narrowly political and diplomatic toward the new vistas in social and economic history.
Bloch's interests were highly interdisciplinary, influenced by the geography of Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918)[12] and the sociology of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).
Bloch was shot by the Gestapo during the German occupation of France in World War II for his active membership of the French Resistance, and Febvre carried on the Annales approach in the 1940s and 1950s.
In the 1960s, Robert Mandrou and Georges Duby harmonized the concept of mentalité history with Fernand Braudel's structures of historical time and linked mentalities with changing social conditions.
He obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and founded the 6th Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, which was devoted to the study of history and the social sciences.
Braudel's followers admired his use of the longue durée approach to stress slow, and often imperceptible effects of space, climate and technology on the actions of human beings in the past.
The Annales historians, after living through two world wars and incredible political upheavals in France, were deeply uncomfortable with the notion that multiple ruptures and discontinuities created history.
This vast panoramic view used ideas from other social sciences, employed effectively the technique of the longue durée, and downplayed the importance of specific events and individuals.
In 1951, historian Bernard Bailyn published a critique of La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'Epoque de Philippe II, which he framed as dichotomizing politics and society.
Annales historians in the 1970s and 1980s turned to urban regions, including Pierre Deyon (Amiens), Maurice Garden (Lyon), Jean-Pierre Bardet (Rouen), Georges Freche (Toulouse), Gregory Hanlon (Agen[18] and Layrac[19]), and Jean-Claude Perrot (Caen).
Franciszek Bujak (1875–1953) and Jan Rutkowski (1886–1949), the founders of modern economic history in Poland and of the journal Roczniki Dziejów Spolecznych i Gospodarczych (1931– ), were attracted to the innovations of the Annales school.
After the Communists took control in the 1940s Polish scholars were safer working on the Middle Ages and the early modern era rather than contemporary history.
Brito Figueroa carried his conception of the field to all levels of university study, emphasizing a systematic and scientific approach to history and placing it squarely in the social sciences.
[27] The current leader is Roger Chartier, who is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Professeur in the Collège de France, and Annenberg Visiting professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.
Chartier's typical undergraduate course focuses upon the making, remaking, dissemination, and reading of texts in early modern Europe and America.
Under the heading of "places", his class explores where texts were made, read, and listened to, including monasteries, schools and universities, offices of the state, the shops of merchants and booksellers, printing houses, theaters, libraries, studies, and closets.
The texts for his course include the Bible, translations of Ovid, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Montaigne's essays, Pepys's diary, Richardson's Pamela, and Franklin's autobiography.