ABSTRACT
Almost thirty years have passed since the "new" social history and its related fields fired the imagination of historians and other social scientists, particularly sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. The original objectives of the new social history were to reintegrate into the historical tapestry people who had been left out of it and to retrieve human experiences that had been neglected. Specifically, the new social history has succeeded in bringing women, children, youth, old people, laborers, slaves, serfs, peasants, farmers, immigrants, and other neglected groups into the historical arena. The new social history has shown in a more direct way how social change impinges on the lives of people and how, in turn, human agency has affected social change. The discovery of individuals' and families' efforts to seize control of their lives has exorcised the ghosts of social breakdown from the study of migration, industrial workplaces, urban communities, and institutions of welfare and social control.
