ABSTRACT
“social history” should be readily definable as the study of historical phenomena which transcend the individual and manifest themselves in human groups. Social history deals with the informal, the unarticulated, the daily and ordinary manifestations of human existence, as a vital plasma in which all more formal and visible expressions are generated. Political, institutional, and intellectual history, as usually practiced, concern themselves with the formal and the fully articulated. Social history bears the same relation to these branches as depth psychology does to standard biography. The potential significance of colonial social history is easy to see. Formal institutions in colonial Iberoamérica were weak and spotty, lacking the manpower, mechanisms, and even generally the will to carry out the activist policies of their counterparts in the twentieth century. The work of Otte, Brading, Schwartz, Boyd-Bowman, and this author can hardly be imagined without the use of a method on the order of multiple or collective biography.
