ABSTRACT

The social history of Native Americans (or North American Indians) is still in its infancy. For over a century, anthropology was the primary academic field encouraging enquiry in Native American studies. In the past 30 to 40 years, ethnohistory, which is a melding of anthropological and historical method, has dominated. Ethnohistory is like social history in its intent to tell history from the bottom up, and like social historians, ethnohistorians must deal with the problem of how people at the bottom left behind few records of their own creation. The following overview of the field, which is based on literature in ethnohistory and social history, covers these subtopics: ethnic identity, historical demography, family, gender, class, and economic dependency.