Rural history

The orthodox historians made "impressive progress" in quantifying and explaining the growth of output and productivity since the agricultural revolution.

A challenge came from a dissident tradition that looked chiefly at the negative social costs of agricultural progress, especially enclosure.

Burchardt calls for a new countryside history, paying more attention to the cultural and representational aspects that shaped 20th-century rural life.

[6] Rural history has been a major specialty of French scholars since the 1920s, thanks especially to the central role of the Annales School.

Its journal Annales focuses attention on the synthesizing of historical patterns identified from social, economic, and cultural history, statistics, medical reports, family studies, and even psychoanalysis.