ABSTRACT
Historians dealt with issues of causation long before the rise of social history. Social history adds certain emphases concerning causation, but there is no single sociohistorical approach. Exploring what causes change can indeed join social and other historians in creating new syntheses about the past and about periodization. At the same time-and again like historians generally-many social historians concentrate on describing phenomena in the past, even in tracing changes, without directly exploring causation. Often, causes are handled implicitly or incompletely, which further prevents any claims to a sociohistorical mode of causal analysis.
