ABSTRACT
Unlike more traditional kinds of history, social history does not focus on events as primary units of description and analysis. This is one of the key sources of disjuncture between social history and political history, one of the key problems in integrating social history into conventional, event-based textbooks. From the early Annales school onward, social historians have grappled with the relationship between events and social processes. The problems involved are not insuperable, but they affect style of presentation and coherence within the wider discipline of history.
