Instead, social historians wanted to show that change arose from within society, complicating the popular belief that powerful leaders were the source of dynamism.
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.
[clarification needed] 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.
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.
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".
The disparity between a society-wide approach (historical materialism) and the narrower preoccupation with giving voice to the voicesless (justice-seeking) is the basis of present-day confusion about the definition of social history.
[7] 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.
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.
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.
Wehler drew upon the modernization theory of Max Weber and concepts from Karl Marx, Otto Hintze, Gustav Schmoller, Werner Sombart and Thorstein Veblen.
[15] In the 1970s and early 1980s, German historians of society, led by Wehler and Jürgen Kocka of the "Bielefeld School", gained dominance in Germany by applying both modernization theories and social science methods.
[24][25][26] Events of Africa's general social history since the twentieth century refer[clarification needed] to the colonial era for most of the countries with the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia, which were never colonized.
[citation needed] Natural phenomena and subsequent economic effects have been more pronounced, for example in Ethiopia, followed by ethnic-based social crises and violence in the twenty-first century — that led to the mass migration of youth and skilled workers.
[31] In Australia, social history took on a non-Marxist concern for revealing the lives of people who had previously been neglected by older generations of historians.
The study of the lives of ordinary people was revolutionized in the 1960s by the introduction of sophisticated quantitative and demographic methods, often using individual data from the census and from local registers of births, marriages, deaths and taxes, as well as theoretical models from sociology such as social mobility.
He recommends a more extensive and critical engagement with the kinds of comparative, transnational and global concerns increasingly popular among labour historians elsewhere, and calls for a revival of public and political interest in the topics.
[45] Meanwhile, Navickas, (2011) examines recent scholarship including the histories of collective action, environment and human ecology, and gender issues, with a focus on work by James Epstein, Malcolm Chase, and Peter Jones.
Feminist women's historians such as Joan Kelly have critiqued early studies of social history for being too focused on the male experience.
It broke new ground with their broad interpretive framework and emphasis on the variable factors shaping women's place in the family and economy in France and England.
It was a story of enlightenment and modernization triumphing over ignorance, cost-cutting, and narrow traditionalism whereby parents tried to block their children's intellectual access to the wider world.
[60][61] The crisis came in the 1960s, when a new generation of New Left scholars and students rejected the traditional celebratory accounts, and identified the educational system as the villain for many of America's weaknesses, failures, and crimes.
Michael Katz (1939–2014) states they: The old guard fought back and bitter historiographical contests, with the younger students and scholars largely promoting the proposition that schools were not the solution to America's ills, they were in part the cause of Americans problems.
[69] A major recent exemplar is Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race between Education and Technology (2009), on the social and economic history of 20th-century American schooling.
A seminal, landmark book, it sparked interest in the 1960s and 1970s in quantitative methods, census sources, "bottom-up" history, and the measurement of upward social mobility by different ethnic groups.
[71] Other exemplars of the new urban history included Kathleen Conzen, Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860 (1976); Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (1975; 2nd ed.
Inspiration from urban geography and sociology, as well as a concern with workers (as opposed to labor union leaders), families, ethnic groups, racial segregation, and women's roles have proven useful.
"[76] The celebratory style of the orthodox school was challenged by a dissident tradition emphasizing the social costs of agricultural progress, notably inclosure, which removed much common resource and lead to riots for some 300 years.
[citation needed] Geographers and sociologists have developed a concept of a "post-productivist" countryside, dominated by consumption and representation that may have something to offer historians, in conjunction with the well-established historiography of the "rural idyll."
[82] Social historians have recently engaged with political history through studies of the relationships between state formation, power and everyday life with the theoretical tools of cultural hegemony and governmentality.