Social history present and future.

Social history has often had its temperature taken. In the United States the first probes came in the 1960s, when social historians had to define their core interests against a skeptical history establishment, reluctant to accept new topics and approaches that did not necessarily aim to illuminate standard subjects. This stock taking evolved, by the 1970s, into seemingly endless needs and opportunities to define the "new social history" to teachers and others now a bit more willing to accept legitimacy but still unsure of what subjects and methods were involved. With the 1980s came the challenge of the "new cultural turn"--was it something different from social history, even a danger to it, or rather an innovation within it?--and also attacks from conservative historians like Gertrude Himmhelfarb, convinced that social history was unseating history's true purposes in uplifting youth and the general public through examples of heroic action and reemphasis on political ideals. Social historians themselves generated a new wave of self-examination, centered around a concern about the field as a multiplicity of topics without a coherent and unifying big picture of its own. Some attention also applied to issues of presentation and narrative. These discussions carried into the early 1990s, with particular reaction to the political attack on social history embodied in the hostile response to the national History Standards in 1994. (1)

Since then, substantial silence has ensued on some of the big issues, which might of course imply that the field has faded sufficiently that general comment is no longer warranted, or that it has become sufficiently hegemonic that assessment seems superfluous. Recently, however, several voices have encouraged a new round of stock-taking. Europeans have taken the lead (and their voices are represented in the comments in this issue). The Journal of Social History now joins in, seeking a multi-faceted discussion over the next few years.

There are several motives. First is the conviction that the field remains sufficiently vibrant and promising to require recurrent self-study. Despite a number of problems both old and new, social history has expanded and continues to expand our knowledge about the past in a variety of ways. The fundamental twin premises--that ordinary people not only have a history but contribute to shaping history more generally, and that a range of behaviors can be profitably explored historically beyond (though also including) the most familiar political staples--are still valid. They explain in turn why the field has outlived fad status, to become a permanent part of the historical arsenal. If some of the brashest early hopes have not been realized--history in general has not been converted to social history or to a sociohistorically informed version of total history, and a decisive sociohistorical periodization has not replaced more conventional, usually political markers--the discipline has nevertheless been transformed. Maintaining the transformation merits and requires a periodic update on where social history stands.

The field is also approaching its half-century mark (granting a previous French lead and granting the importance of some earlier social history efforts even outside of France). However artificial, half-centuries are good points for stock-taking. They also contribute a generational challenge. In the United States, the pioneers of the new social history--many of them remarkably productive over a long period of time (social history as longevity formula?)--are now passing from the scene. The field's future rests in younger hands. It's a moment that invites some reflection by some of the older hands, and, even more, some strutting by a sample of the many promising newcomers as well as some of the mid-career leaders active, for example, in expanding social history's range outside Europe and the United States.

The passing of the most assertive aspects of the "cultural turn" also invites comment. Many of the essays in this collection note a revival of sociohistorical explanations and/or the need for social history correctives to overindulgence in the cultural turn. While cultural approaches to social history, emphasizing the importance of beliefs and assumptions and their causal role in group behavior, still predominate, at least in the United States, other vantagepoints are beginning to reemerge. There is even a modest revival of quantitative work, around issues in family history and other topics. And some venturesome social historians are generating large statements based on non-cultural factors such as economic structure or marriage patterns. Finally, while references to Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas and others continue, they seem to be diminishing. Lynn Hunt has noted, not without some wistfulness, the decline in theory interest. (2)

The result opens both problems and opportunities for social history. The field has passed through two dominant, though never monopolistic, methodologies, quantitative and cultural. It has passed through two successive social science flirtations, first with sociology, then with anthropology. Social history seems to be sufficiently resilient and flexible to survive and even benefit from mutations of this sort. The cultural turn had always raised questions for social historians, about how cultural causation might mix with other factors; about the range of documentation needed to establish a cultural case--whether unpacking meanings in a single document or ritual sufficed for a social as opposed to a purely cultural historian; and about cultural versus other determinants of social class. At the same time, cultural interpretations helped answer, and continue to help answer, questions about the reasons for changes in behaviors in such areas as demography. And there is danger as well as invitation in the lack of any overarching new approach, as the cultural turn recedes. Here, then, is ample occasion for further conversation around four related topics: what pre-cultural interests might now be usefully be revived; how can we preserve the undeniable strengths of the cultural turn; do we need to pay renewed attention to issues of narrative style (an older issue which receded during the cultural enthusiasm); and what's next for the field as a whole? (3)

In sum: the occasion for renewed discussion of social history's status and prospects involves a combination of two transitions: generational (in my view at least, as part of the passing crowd eager to identify younger leadership) and methodological. The occasion invites brief nostalgia, a review of some of the concerns social historians have grappled with for many years with mixed success, and a comment on some new issues emerging with unusual force.

Youth and Vigor

Nostalgia, but within limits: It may be hard for younger practitioners to realize how exciting social history was thirty or forty years ago, when the field seemed brand new, defying the canons of conventional history. Eric Hobsbawm had it right back then when he talked of what a great time it was to be a historian. (4) We knew each other, by work if not in person, and we could easily identify ourselves against the many historians bent on adhering to the same tired list of standard periods and topics. I doubt that this spirit can ever return to social history, if only because of the success the field has obtained--which means also that it would be distracting to wallow in regret. At a time when a large minority of historians proclaim themselves as social historians at least in part, and when social history has moved from birth pains to some phase of mottled maturity, defiant self-identification inevitably blurs. It was fun when all topics seemed new, when youth of field and youth in profession combined, when the world needed conversion.

But it is not only unwise to press nostalgia too far--there's no surer way of losing the audience I want to reach--but inaccurate as well. There are still dragons to be slain, in the various kinds of conventional history that still resist the social history vision and the various partisan takes on history that dispute social history directly. There are new topics to explore. Every year, as JSH editor, I receive a number of really good articles, including two or three that literally produce shivers of excitement because of the new data and insights involved, because of what is suggested about basic human behavior over time. Add to this the similarly inspiring articles placed elsewhere, plus the periodic path-breaking books, and there seems little question that the enthusiasm remains. I can only assume that the historians involved share this same sense of fundamental discovery, of important questions asked and answered--about the past, and about how and why people function as they do.

Social history has shown a remarkable capacity to generate new interests, while maintaining a recognizable allegiance to its commitment to exploring the experiences and roles of diverse groups and the wide range of human behaviors. Few of the topics that commanded prime attention forty years ago now head the lists. Sometimes, indeed, social history's topics may revolve too quickly: one of the tasks for the future may entail returning to earlier interests that need fuller exploration or an updating in light of more recent developments or social needs. I think for example of social protest, that played such a fundamental role in launching the field but which now has few adepts, at least where American social history is concerned, but which begs for renewed commentary. Social mobility, dropped far too quickly in the United States after such fruitful beginnings, is another case in point. Mary Hartman's sweeping (forthcoming) reinterpretation of early modern European history in light of the European-style family, another fundamental interest that was too blithely abandoned, shows the power of reexamining older topics and findings and extending their reach. Old age history was abandoned too fast, after a few stimulating general surveys and a surprisingly small number of (good) specific monographs, and as Pat Thane's essay suggests, it will surely return as the implications of graying gain global attention. But the gains of flexibility and the capacity to move on are important as well. Gender history was, after all, not on the original topical roster, but flowed from the combination of political movement and the tools social history offered. The history of childhood seemed on the whole too difficult when modern social history first began, despite a few provocative efforts, but it is now receiving varied and imaginative attention. The history of emotions, though called for early on, only became possible within the past twenty years, partly because of the cultural turn, and it continues to yield surprising findings. The point is clear, at least to my biased eyes: the good old days have been followed by some pretty good new days. The field retains its ability to innovate and excite. (5)

I once argued that no aspect of human behavior should be denied to social history, not even sleep. And now we have some really promising efforts even on sleep. (6) Add to this the number of historical staples that have been redone by social history--from religion to consumerism--and the number of social history topics that have themselves become cottage industries, like women, or working class, or leisure, or slavery and emancipation,--and the sense of continued accomplishment is hard to deny.

Indeed, social history's capacity to generate new topics belies some of the common criticisms of the field. While there is no single methodology, the openness to the historical construction of various aspects of the human experience, the valuation of relatively ordinary people as historical subjects and agents, and some sense of key historical causes and big changes in the human experience overall, combine to create considerable analytical power. A willingness to provide historical explanation for a changing parade of topical concerns makes social history a vital player in social inquiry more generally, while steadily expanding the definition of a usable past.

And even though the sense of novelty has inevitably waned, some of the early constraints have diminished as well. Documentation is a key case in point. Who talks now, for example, of the inarticulate, when it turns out there are so many ways of getting at the voices of the previously unheard, and of finding evidence for some of the more private aspects of the human experience? * The vitality of the field has transcended many of the barriers that seemed so daunting early on.

Problems in Maturity

But if vitality seems endemic to the field, even as it has matured, so do some characteristic problems--some, perhaps, a function of vitality itself. Another interesting feature of the essays in this collection--perhaps depressing, perhaps simply inevitable--is the extent to which they grapple with many familiar issues, albeit sometimes in new ways. The roster includes narrativity; synthesis and fragmentation; and the state and politics--in all of which current comment echoes unresolved definitional issues from decades past. As was the case forty years ago, for example, there are still social historians who think in terms of topics and causation that largely leave the state out (though they no longer say so explicitly), and others who find political explanation one of social history's main purposes--a healthy tension, I would argue, but certainly an endemic one.

Early on, practitioners noted the gap between a sense of kindred sociohistorical enterprise and the fact that the field consisted of a variety of subtopics rather than a general vision of the past. Family, crime, protest, slavery--all were social history, but what their causal or chronological links, one to the other, "were unclear at best. If anything, this issue of fragmentation has intensified. Partly because of further specialization and topical expansion, partly because of the distraction of the cultural turn, and partly perhaps because of partial incorporation into general textbooks, the effort do to general social histories of key areas has fallen by the wayside. Few if any historians have recently attempted Charles Tilly's "big changes" approach as a means of talking about basic social history turning points. Correspondingly, the invitation to develop characteristic social history periodization, to replace both a topic-by-topic chronology and the need to rely on conventional political markers, has not been fully answered. To be sure, a social history focus has helped spur attention to the decades around 1820 as a key watershed in American history, but this seems an exception to the rule. If social history is to be measured by coherent overall frameworks, it falls short--and immaturity is no longer an excuse. We need renewed attention to broader synthesis not only to address an endemic problem, but to respond to the additional, almost inherent particularism of the cultural turn. (7)

The dilemma of social history and history teaching remains open as well. Early on, it seemed clear that so much energy and reward were going into innovative research, that there simply was inadequate attention available for teaching models. (8) More recently, at least in the United States, the combination of routine-mindedness and overwork among many teachers, with the resurgence of political conservatism and its deep hostility to social history in the classroom, have generated scant incentive for further advance. Some change has occurred. Social history discoveries plus sheer political and pedagogical pull have gained women and some minorities a place in standard textbooks. No longer does slavery, in American history, exist mainly to be abolished in a triumph of humanitarian enlightenment. But the social history topics are still squeezed into a largely conventional political framework, and they sometimes appear sporadically, without offering the opportunity to analyze key changes over time. And the behavioral findings in social history--the work on family, or leisure, or manners--simply don't make it into mainstream teaching agendas, which means that few students gain access to social history's explanatory power in assessing how current patterns emerge from the past. Here, there really is an opportunity for a new sense of missionary zeal, related in some sense to a capacity to develop some big-picture social history. For American practitioners: Take a look at the history learning standards adopted in most states, their meager social history content and their resolute sense that history is great people and great events, and get mad. But I'm not sure where the missionaries are, where the constructive anger is, in an aspect of the history agenda that was never one of social history's great strengths.

The relationship between social history and a wider reading public is less dire, but it remains mixed and mysterious. As many have noted, American interest in historical museums, broadly construed, has increased spectacularly, and many museums have become sophisticated sites of social history presentation. Some social history offerings have also made good use of new media, and a few films add to the list, again with popular effect. But formal reading fare, and the history channel on cable television, continue largely to define history in terms of battles and wars, spiced by an occasional biography. Explicit efforts by social historians to write for a wider public have typically yielded little fruit--one can get on local talk shows, in their hunger for subject matter, usually to answer random questions, but there's little sense of breakthrough either to wide sales or to impact on popular historical thinking. It's hard to argue that public understanding of social history staples like family or work patterns has been much affected by popularized scholarly findings or analysis. In some cases, even where museum presentations are involved, the conservative surge in the United States has further weakened social history program content, lest key donors and self-appointed patriots be offended. Yet here too, occasionally, a glimmer of hope. Surely historians who helped convey the internship experiences of the Japanese, in World War II, and work them into public consciousness, contributed to the quick understanding, after 9/11, that Muslim Americans must not be scapegoated at least to the same extent.

And there's real progress as well on another front, long debated. Twenty years ago John Demos lamented his failure to work social history findings into the thinking of policymakers on family subjects. (9) And perhaps he would be no more heartened today. But social history, on its behavioral side, has become a standard part of analyses of topics like drinking, or gambling, or sexuality, or crime, or dieting and obesity, and some of this welcome spills over into presentations to a wider public as well. This is a far cry from the early days when one historian, invited to a presentation on gender issues, was urged not to identify his discipline lest he alienate his audience. The sense that social history is a routine part of explaining why people function as they do, and why characteristic social problems and behaviors have emerged as they have, is a tremendous gain, and one that a next generation of social historians can build upon. Social history has become a key player in fundamental discussions of the culturally and socially constructed aspects of the human experience, and we can and should press forward on this interdisciplinary front. Researchers in contemporary social history should become more aggressive in linking their findings to contemporary issues, through vigorous discussions of change, continuity and causation in basic human behaviors, more fully exploiting the connections that have already emerged with other fields of behavioral inquiry.

Indeed, one of social history's key strengths, though not obvious at the outset, is its capacity to respond to changing social concerns by providing not just historical background, but active analytical perspective. This contributes to the frequently changing topical roster--think, for example about the tremendous strides in the history of death, when this subject seized public consciousness by the late 1960s, or the contributions to historicizing youth or to old age; all subjects that are now, for the moment, more quiescent. Unquestionably, the agility contributes greatly to apparent fragmentation, but there are some underlying unities in: the interest in breadth of human experience, the capacity to relate special topics to larger patterns of cultural or economic change, the commitment to ordinary more than to extraordinary people, and the imaginative use and discovery of relevant sources. Though not its only function, social history serves as a mirror of changing contemporary concerns, and its contributions to interdisciplinary inquiry expand accordingly.

The New Challenge: Global Issues

Up to this point, aside from defining the current moment in terms of generational transition and the fading of the cultural turn, we've stayed on fairly familiar ground, with topics that have been part of state-of-social-history discussions for at least two decades. The contours have changed: the incorporation of social history into topical social science research is one example on the plus side, the deflating effect of American conservative hostility to social history is another decidedly on the negative. But the agenda was clear some time ago. We turn now to a newer area, whose implications constitute a real challenge to the social history of the future. The subject is geography and globalization. Again, many of the following essays expand on this topic as well.

Social history, like its parent discipline, has almost always been highly place-specific. The advantage is obvious: when dealing with new topics, often complexly embedded in regional cultures and local geographies and economies, know your area well. Even aside from regional social history, most social historians felt insecure exploring beyond the nation-state (whose relevance for many social history topics was often however questionable). Some historians, pushing now for more microhistory, feel that the field has already been too venturesome. (10) The cultural turn, on the whole, though not wedded to microhistory necessarily, gave further impetus to reliance on fairly small geographical scope. Against this grain, for what it's worth, I had long hoped that topical social history might loosen geographical constraints a bit, toward more interest in behaviors such as crime or leisure that would cut across regional lines. I have always tried to arrange JSH articles and reviews accordingly, with what effect I am not sure.

And there have been gains. Though still distressingly limited, comparative social history has flourished in some topical areas, such as slavery, emancipation, and more recently working class. Social history plays a key role, also, in the emerging attention to crosscutting interregional forces, particularly in Atlantic studies (though we need comparable attention to other geographical combinations). Even more cheering, and a vital part of the field's future, the topical range initially developed for Europe or the U.S. has increasingly emerged in regional specialty areas like Latin America and Africa. Asian, African and Latin American social history has long been strongly developed around some crucial subjects (the peasantry, for example), as part of area studies more generally. But now we have rich family and childhood history, leisure studies, and the like, though this expansion is clearer for some regions than others. Modern Russian social history, similarly, has expanded beyond a preoccupation with origins of revolution to deal with popular culture, sexuality, and of course gender. Collectively, this is all a net increment for the link between social history and appropriate geographic scope, whether comparative or transregional. (11)

But new challenges emerge. International relations and social history have never mixed well, if only because so much diplomatic decision-making is an elite affair. For a good while, this mismatch resulted simply in a decline of diplomatic history, as social history soared. But now the felt need for historical perspective on international relations increases, and social historians need to exercise more imagination in developing appropriate linkages. Many history departments are responding to 9/11 with a call for emphasis on diplomatic history, and the impulse is understandable. In fact, of course, the roots of terrorism, and many responses to terrorism, are as much social as purely diplomatic, but social historians have not pioneered in making the necessary connections.

At the teaching level, and to some extent in research, the United States has experienced a dramatic surge in world history, well before the recent international crisis. Again, social history has not always fit comfortably with a world history framework. World historians struggle to include women's history and some issues of social structure, but they are often so busy with their sheer geographical range, and so hampered by the lack of studies of social topics that explicitly link to global frameworks, that the temptation to emphasize politics, high culture and trade often proves insurmountable. And from the explicitly social history side, there has not been a clear response, or indeed any particular take on world history.

Finally, there is the phenomenon of globalization. Historians of any stripe have not taken a lead in identifying globalization, and of course the extent and the novelty of the phenomenon can and should be debated. There are however some provocative recent approaches. One group, self-styled as "new global" historians, works on the recency and magnitude of globalization changes. Another studies analogies between a past experience of globalization, in the decades around 1900 (an experience which ended in retrenchment in the years after World War I), and more recent developments. Both approaches are interesting, and both are perfectly compatible with social history. What better way to test the reach of current globalization than to measure it against, say, the experience of gender or of childhood? How can one compare two modern surges of globalization without dealing with the emergence of global popular cultures in both periods? There are ripe topics here--but to date, social historians have not really seized them. The lead in historical work on globalization is taken by specialists in international relations spiced by imaginative mavericks from fields like the history of science and even psychohistory. (12)

For a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, historians are reconsidering their geographical frameworks, with results that place new emphasis on the importance of comparison and on the ability to think in terms of global or at least interregional connections. Social historians, with increasingly rich results from work in a wide range of geographical areas, can participate in this reconsideration, but they have not yet seized a leadership role and risk being outflanked. Could this be the next conceptual challenge, after the cultural turn?

We probably face three options for social history's future, though it is vital to hear other voices on the subject. The first will involve some continued interest in social history on two different bases: first, where younger practitioners understand the necessity of including social history findings--on demography, for example--in their survey teaching and as part of establishing context for their own research, whether this is on culture, or international relations, or some other area--without, usually, a strong self-identification as social historians. And second, a deep, excited commitment to further inquiry into special topics within social history, like childhood or the senses or popular humor. This special topics approach could maintain the fruitful connection between social history and particular fields of social science inquiry. But here too self-identified social history would fade. Or third, along with the general interest and certainly the special topics approach, an ongoing commitment to larger issues of periodization, social structure, and geographic breadth that can innovate in its own right and help keep the other two approaches honest.

This third option, to my mind greatly preferable, would incorporate the first two but add an ongoing and explicit commitment to the field as a whole. This kind of commitment, I would argue, is ultimately essential to keep the historians who prefer to dip into social history adequately informed and stimulated, to prevent them from letting the social history materials recede further into the background, and to provide them with updated findings; essential as well to provide a wider framework for the special topics research, which otherwise risks still further fragmentation and an inability to deal with basic issues in chronology and causation. Only this commitment balances the gains of cultural analysis with appropriate attention to social structure and social causation. * Only this commitment to the field will allow a renewed attack on concerns like social history in teaching and the onslaughts of conservative pedagogy, or the apparently endemic tension between new topics and the need for a more general picture. Only this commitment, finally, will allow social historians to deal directly with new challenges, such as the changing geographical base for historical inquiry--challenges that vitally affect social history's role in the discipline as a whole, and which could lead to exciting conceptual breakthroughs in comparative analysis or assessments of globalization. The question is not whether we should preserve a special social history identity, even a vigorous reassertion of some of the larger claims of the field; but whether we will.

The social history of the future does not require agreement on all points, or on the same level of commitment. We can and should debate, for example, issues of geographical scope, and listen to the excitement of the microhistorians while also talking with globalists. We can welcome some fellow travelers and a variety of sub-specialties. But we do need at least some social historians willing to recover some of the bigger picture concerns for example, for discussions of social class, ** or the implications of demographic change--that have receded during the cultural turn. We do need some social historians willing to reassert the importance of teaching about processes rather than events and eager to dispute a narrowing or rigidification of the history canon.

In the end, of course, the key to the future lies in social history's capacity to generate new understandings of the past and how the past has shaped the present. We're talking ultimately about the continued ability to explore how basic changes in human behavior occur, and through this to offer fundamental contributions to knowledge. Bold claims, but at its best social history has already met the challenge. Through new discovery, new synthesis, and new capacity to teach and disseminate, social history maintains its high potential. There's more to come.

Department of History and Art History

Fairfax, VA 22030

* It is revealing in the diverse essays that follow, how few concerns about evidence surface, in contrast to the anxiety in the field's early days. Of course there remain topics where evidence is frustratingly elusive or inconclusive. But general discussion has shifted from whether evidence is available to what kinds should be preferred and how meaning can best be derived.

* One of the salutary themes in several of the following essays insists on the importance of economic causation in the world today, amid growing and distressing stratifications, as a reminder that, whatever their importance and charm, cultural definitions must not preclude wider inquiry.

** Note, in the essays that follow in this issue, the frequent reference to the need to revive attention to social class, as a corrective to the frequent quirkiness of the cultural turn, or as a framework for innovative research on this history of the senses, or as a framework for re-engaging with explanations of political patterns. Revival need nut be repetition: Christophe Charle, for example, notes the importance of tuning the explorations of social structure more finely, to deal with smaller social groups.

ENDNOTES

(1.) Some of us used to write at least one definition a year, which did wonders for the vita if less for clearing the air. For a record of key developments, see Charles Tilly, "The Old New Social History and the New Old Social History," Review 7 (1984): 363-406; James Henretta, "Social History as Lived and Written," American Historical Review 84 (1979): 1293-1323; Mary Layton, Elliott Gorn, and Peter Williams, eds., Encyclopedia of American Social History, v I: Part II, Methods and Contexts, 235-434; Lawrence Stone, Past and Present (Boston, 1981); Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Denigrating the Rule of Reason: The 'new history' goes bottoms up," Harper's Magazine (April, 1984); Journal of Social History Special Issue 29 (1995): Peter N. Stearns, "Social History Today ... And Tomorrow," Journal of Social History 10 (1976): 129-155.

(2.) Lynn Hunt, "Where have All the Theories Gone," American Historical Association Perspectives (Mar., 2002).

(3.) Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989); Lenard Berlanstein, Rethinking Labor History: essays on discourse and class analysis (Urbana, 1993); see also Lynn Hunt and Victoria Bonnell, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley, 1999).

(4.) Eric Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," Daedalus C (1971): 43.

(5.) On the topical evolution, Peter N. Stearns, "The Old Social History and the New," in Layton, Gorn, and Williams, eds., Encyclopedia, I, pp. 237-50; on the upcoming flowering of the history of childhood, Paula Fass, ed., The Encyclopedia of the History of Childhood, forthcoming.

(6.) Roger Ekrich, "The Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber on the British Isles," American Historical Review 106 (2001); Peter N. Steams, Perrin Rowland, and Lori Giarnella, "Children's Sleep: Sketching Historical Change," Journal of Social History 30 (1997): 345-366.

(7.) On the big changes approach, Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comarisons (New York, 1984); Olivier Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past: The World of Social History (Chapel Hill, 1985); for an impressive recent effort, though quite different from Tilly's, Mary Hartman, The Household in the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past (Cambridge, forthcoming). On redoing U.S. history periodization, Christopher Clark, Roots of Rural Capitalism (Ithaca, 1990); David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York, 1978).

(8.) Peter N. Stearns, "Social History and the Teaching of History," in Matthew Downey, ed., Teaching American History: New Directions (Washington, DC., 1980); Linda Rosenzweig and Peter N. Stearns, Social History Curriculum for Secondary Schools (Pittsburgh, 1982).

(9.) John Demos, Past, Present and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History (New York, 1986).

(10.) Sigurdur Magnusson, "The Singularization of History: Social History and Michrohistory within the Postmodern State of Knowledge," Journal of Social History 36 (2003).

(11.) Michael Adas, "Social History and the Revolution in African and Asian Historiography," Journal of Social History 19 (1985): 335-378.

(12.) Robert McMahon, "Globalization and History," paper presented at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting, April, 2002; Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjers, eds., Conceptualizing Global History (Boulder, 1993).

By Peter N. Stearns

George Mason University