What is social history?

order to gain professional advancement often counts for more than the intrinsic interest of the topic. B Social history is quite different. It touches on, and arguably helps to focus, major issues of public debate. It mobilises popular enthusiasm and engages popular passions. It prides itself on being concerned with everyday things rather than sensational events and is directed against the 'Great Man' theories that originally characterised history, and the tedious focus on bureaucratic issues that subsequently dominated the 1920s and 30s. This is also reflected in the way it is taught, through the adoption of multi-disciplinary perspectives rather than a narrow historical interpretation. C Social history emerged, both as a popular enthusiasm and as a scholarly practice, from the cultural revolution of the 1960s in North America and Europe, and reproduces its leading inspirations. The spirit of social history was pre-eminently a modernising one, as reflected in its choice of subject matter. Whereas traditional history had focused on the 12th to 17th centuries, social history was apt to make its historical homeland in the 19th century, while latterly, it has even begun to extend its inquiry up to contemporary events and…