ABSTRACT
This chapter considers historians' varied approaches to letters. It explores the practice of historians committed to 'history from below', who read letters for the access they give to 'the real' and seek to elicit from them factual details about social life in the past. The chapter discusses the possibilities for reconstructing social history from letters, and also the anxieties that epistolary methodology provokes. It also explores the work of historians from the 1990s to the 2010s who have focused on letter writing as a social and cultural practice rather than on letters as a seam to be mined for facts. The chapter discusses historians' engagement with these issues through a focus on the wealth of work on personal correspondence in the two world wars of the twentieth century. It reviews a number of social and cultural analyses of war letters, as well as discussing the work of historians who draw explicitly on psychoanalytic and post-colonial theory.
