Social history

History is always trying to be decoded in different ways. Geoff Eley, author of in A Crooked Line, attempts to describe the quick transformation between 1970 to 1980 from social history to cultural history because of dramatic reforms in political standpoints and the linguistic turn of the social history that was studied in earlier years. The goals of Eley’s book is to not only describe how the world changed from studying social history to cultural history but also to highlight the importance of…

differing views and methods among each other. In From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods, Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier provide a history of the methodical and theoretical changes that historians have embraced and rejected. Many of these transformations were inspired by other disciplines as well as a reflection of social and political climates. Howell and Prevenier explain the different schools of thought, such as structuralism, post-structuralism, positivist views, as…

upper-class individuals dominate the canon of Western History. While such a dominance does not negate their scholarship, the voices of the marginalized—women, the poor and ethnic minorities—are not represented in this limited historical viewpoint. Many mid-20th century historians felt that there was a need to counter this inequality of representation. For example, E.P. Thompson, Clifford Geertz and Natalie Zemon Davis each generated works that revealed the history of a previously marginalized…

learning about the past. The history classes that I’ve taken are the classes required to pass high school, which were world history, U.S. government, and U.S. history. Most of the history I know is from watching documentaries or movies. I have never had a bad experience when learning about history it always is of interest to me. My experiences have always been good because my instructors made it interesting and learning about the past is usually pretty fun for me. One of my history instructors…

In “Marxism and History” by Christopher Hill, Hill begins his article with the assertion that Marxism has influenced history more than any other branch of knowledge. Hill offers six points to describe how the ideas of Marx have transformed history and historians in the (then) 100 years since the creation of The Communist Manifesto. By analyzing these six points laid out by Hill, one can come to understand Marx’s legacy for historically understanding social class and economy. First and foremost,…

However, there was a time when a number of historians and social scientists were hesitant about accepting this truism. By films, one means not merely documentaries, which obviously directly capture something of the reality of people’s lives and feelings, but also mainstream Hollywood commercial films. It is not only that these films sometimes convey and imitate the surfaces of day to day life, the way people talk, dress and consume- though social realism is clearly not anaesthetic that…

the many changes that have occurred and molded the modern world and the manner by which people have taken them by proving that science knowledge relies on history and is powered through social interaction and the philosophy of science. Has a professor of History of Science at Harvard University. He has written many books including A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in the Seventeenth-Century England (1994), The Scientific Life (2008), and Never Pure (2010). Critics of the The…

Canadian historian Donald Creighton. Hufton later published these lectures as Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution. Prior to her shift towards women’s history in the 1980s, Hufton was primarily interested in poverty and social relations; her previous books focused on social history and political history, one of which attempted to place the French Revolution in a broader historical context. Partially in response to the plethora of publications that emphasize specific…

Similar to social history, Southern Historians have long focused on military history as another top method to study the South. The history of the Civil War has long interested Southerners across since it has impacted the South as it is known even today. However, similar to how Stewart brought social and environmental history together, military and environmental history can be used in unison to better tell the history of the war. In The Blue, The Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental…

Richard Muller in the “Reflection on Persistent Whiggism and Its Antidotes in the Study of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Intellectual History”. The purpose of the article is to examined how the contemporary scholars are relating to the historical context of the sixteenth and the seventeenth century. The article also identified the thinkers and how they changed the ideologies of the church during the reformation era. Richard Muller argued that one must understand theological and…