ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the contribution of social history to historical inquiry. Often thought in the past to be a somewhat marginal interest, devoted for the most part to aspects of the human experience that were trivial when compared with weightier matters such as politics, recent years have witnessed a sharp growth in studies broadly under the umbrella of social history. The chapter discusses one of the other organizing concepts of social history, namely, the family. Since the 1960s social historians have applied themselves to the task of overcoming the sorts of criticisms levelled by Hobsbawm, and the branch has continued to flourish. The progressive erosion of a sense of community, authority and deference, social stability and tradition, all of which have been identified as key features, impose a uniformity and linearity on family change which never existed. Class consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms.
