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What is Social History?

A new form of antiquarianism? Celebrating experience at the expense of analysis? Seven leading historians seek to define social history.

‘It prides itself on being concerned with 'real life' rather than abstractions’

Raphael Samuel was Professor of History at the University of East London and one of the founding figures of the History Workshop movement. His books include Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (1994) and Theatres of Memory: Volume 2: Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (1997)

E ver since its elevation to the status of a discipline, and the emergence of a hierarchically organised profession, history has been very largely concerned with problematics of its own making. Sometimes it is suggested by 'gaps' which the young researcher is advised by supervisors to fill; or by an established interpretation which, iconoclastically, he or she is encouraged to challenge. Fashion may direct the historians' gaze; or a new methodology may excite them; or they may stumble on an untapped source. But whatever the particular focus, the context is that enclosed and esoteric world in which research is a stage in the professional career; and the 'new' interpretation counts for more than the substantive interest of the matter in hand.

Social history is quite different. It touches on, and arguably helps to focus, major issues of public debate, as for example on British national character or the nature of family life. It mobilises popular enthusiasm and engages popular passions. Its practitioners are counted in thousands rather than hundreds – indeed tens of thousands if one were to include (as I would) those who fill the search rooms of the Record Offices, and the local history rooms of the public libraries, documenting family 'roots'; the volunteer guides at the open-air museums; or the thousands of railway fanatics who spend their summer holidays acting as guards or station staff on the narrow gauge lines of the Pennines and North Wales. Social history does not only reflect public interest, it also prefigures and perhaps helps to create it. Thus 'Victorian Values' were being rehabilitated by nineteenth-century enthusiasts for a decade or more before Mrs Thatcher appropriated them for her Party's election platform; while Professor Hoskins' discovery of 'lost' villages, and his celebration of the English landscape anticipated some of the animating sentiments which have been made the conservationist movement a force for planners to reckon with.

As a pedagogic enthusiasm, and latterly as an academic practice, social history derives its vitality from its oppositional character. It prides itself on being concerned with 'real life' rather than abstractions, with 'ordinary' people rather than privileged elites, with everyday things rather than sensational events. As outlined by J.R. Green in his Short History of the English People (1874) it was directed against 'Great Man' theories of history, championing the peaceful arts against the bellicose preoccupations of 'drum-and-trumpet' history. In its inter-war development, represented in the schools by the Piers Plowman text-books, and in the universities by Eileen Power's Medieval People and the work of the first generation of economic historians, it evoked the human face of the past – and its material culture – against the aridities of constitutional and administrative development.' The Annales school in, France called for the study of structure and process rather than the analysis of individual events, emphasising the grand permanencies of geography, climate and soil.

Urban history, pioneered as a cottage industry by H.J. Dyos in the 1960s, and labour history, as redefined in E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, was a protest against the routinisation and narrowing of economic history, together with (in the case of Thompson) sideswipes at the invading generalities of the sociologists.

Social history owes its current prosperity, both as a popular enthusiasm and as a scholarly practice, to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and reproduces – in however mediated a form – its leading inspirations. One is dealing here with homologies rather than influences or, in any publicly acknowledged sense, debts, so that any coupling is necessarily speculative and might seem impertinent to the historians concerned. Nevertheless, if only as a provocation and as a way of positioning history within the imaginative complexes of its time, some apparent convergences might be suggested.

The spirit of 1960s social history – tacking in its own way to the 'winds of change' – was pre-eminently a modernising one, both chronologically, in the choice of historical subject matter, and methodologically, in the adoption of multi-disciplinary perspectives. Whereas constitutional history had its original heart in medieval studies, and economic history, as it developed in the 1930s and 1940s, was centrally preoccupied with Tudor and Stuart times (the famous controversy on 'The Rise of the Gentry' is perhaps representative), the 'new' social history, first in popular publication in the railway books (as of David and Charles) and later in its academic version, was apt to make its historical homeland in Victorian Britain, while latterly, in its enthusiasm for being 'relevant' and up-to-date, it has shown a readiness, even an eagerness, to extend its inquiry to the present. Methodologically too, in ways presciently announced at the beginning of the decade in E.H. Carr's What is History? the new social history was hospitable to the social sciences, and much of the energy behind the expansion of Past and Present – the most ecumenical of the social history journals, and the first to be preoccupied with the inter-relationship of history and 'theory' – came from the discovery of historical counterparts to the categories of social anthropology and sociology: e.g. 'sub-cultures', social mobility, crowd psychology, and latterly gender identities.

One way in which numbers of the new social historians made themselves at home in the past was by projecting modernity backwards, finding anticipations of the present in the past. This seems especially evident in the American version of social history, where modernisation theory is a leading inspiration (Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, a celebration of the allegedly civilising process, is an accessible and influential example). It can also be seen in the preoccupation with the origins of 'companionate' marriage and the modern family, a work pioneered in a liberal-humanist vein by Lawrence Stone, and in a more conservative one by Peter Laslett and Alan Macfarlane. Keith Thomas' magnificent Man and the Natural World , like his earlier Religion and the Decline of Magic , though finely honed and attentive to counter-tendencies, might also said to be structured by a version of modernisation theory documenting the advance of reason and humanity.

The plebeian subject matter favoured by the new social history, corresponds to other cultural manifestations of the 1960s, as for instance 'new wave' British cinema, with its cockney and provincial heroes, 'pop art' with its use of everyday artefacts, or the transformation of a 'ghetto' beat (Liverpool sound) into a national music. Similarly, the anti-institutional bias of the new social history – the renewed determination to write the history of 'ordinary' people as against that of statecraft, could be said to echo, or even, in some small part to be a constituent element in, a much more widespread collapse of social deference, and a questioning of authority figures of all kinds. In another field – that of historical conservation – one could point to the new attention being given to the preservation and identification of vernacular architecture; to the spread of open-air, 'folk', and industrial museums, with their emphasis on the artefacts of everyday life; and on the retrieval and publication of old photographs, with a marked bias towards the representation of scenes from humble life. The democratisation of genealogy, and the remarkable spread of family history societies – a 'grassroots' movement of primary research – could also be said to reflect the egalitarian spirit of the 1960s; a new generation of researchers finds as much delight in discovering plebeian origins as earlier ones did the tracing of imaginary aristocratic pedigrees.

Another major 1960's influence on the new social history – very different in its origins and effects – was the 'nostalgia industry' which emerged as a kind of negative counterpart, or antiphon, to the otherwise hegemonic modernisation of the time. The animating sentiment – a very opposite of Mr Wilson's 'white heat of modern technology', or Mr Macmillan's 'winds of change' – was a poignant sense of loss, a disenchantment, no less apparent on the Left of the political spectrum than on the Right – with post-war social change. One is dealing here with a whole set of transferences and displacements in which a notion of 'tradition', previously attached to the countryside and disappearing crafts was transposed into an urban and industrial setting.

Automation, electrification and smokefree zones transformed steam-powered factories into industrial monuments. Property restorers, working in the interstices of comprehensive re-development, turned mean streets into picturesque residences – Victorian 'cottages' rather than emblems of poverty, overcrowding and ill-health. The pioneers here were the railway enthusiasts who, in the wake of the Beeching axe and dieselisation, embarked on an extravagant series of rescue operations designed to bring old lines back to life. A little later came the steam traction fanatics; the collectors of vintage fairground engines; and the narrow-boat enthusiasts and canal trippers, bringing new life to disused industrial waterways. Industrial archaeology, an invention of the 1960s, followed in the same track, elevating relics of the industrial revolution, like Coalbrookdale, to the status of national monuments. In another sphere one could point to the proliferation of folk clubs (one of the early components of 1960s 'counter- culture'), and the discovery of industrial folk song, as prefiguring one of the major themes of the new social history: the dignity of labour. Another of its major themes – solidarity – could be said to have been anticipated by that sub-genre of autobiography and sociological enquiry – Hoggart's Uses of Literacy (1957) was the prototype – which made the vanishing slum a symbol of lost community.'

So far as historical work was concerned, these sentiments crystallised in an anti-progressive interpretation of the past, a folkloric enthusiasm for anachronism and survival, and an elegaic regard for disappearing communities. 'Resurrectionism' – rescuing the past from the 'enormous condescension' of posterity, reconstituting the vanished components of 'The World We Have Lost' – became a major impetus in historical writing and research. The dignity of 'ordinary' people could be said to be the unifying theme of this line of historical inquiry and retrieval, a celebration of everyday life, even, perhaps especially, when it involved hardship and suffering.

The general effect of the new social history has been to enlarge the map of historical knowledge and legitimate major new areas of scholarly inquiry – as for example the study of house- holds and kinship; the history of popular culture; the fate of the outcast and the oppressed. It has given a new lease of life to extra-mural work in history, more especially with the recent advent of women's history to which social history has been more hospitable than others. It has built bridges to the popular representation of history on television. In the schools it has helped to produce, or been accompanied by, a very general turn from 'continuous' history to superficially project and topic-based learning – a change whose merits the Minister of Education, as well as others, are now challenging. It has also produced a number of 'do-it-yourself' historical projects, as in local history, labour history, oral history, woman's history, which have taken the production of historical knowledge far outside academically defined fiefs.

The new social history has also demonstrated the usefulness – and indeed the priceless quality – of whole classes of documents which were previously held in low esteem: house- hold inventories as an index of kinship, obligations and ties: court depositions as evidence of sociability; wills and testaments as tokens of religious belief. It is less than a century since a distinguished scholar remarked that no serious historian would be interested in a laundry bill. The publications of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the patrician collections of 'family' papers which adorn the County Record Offices testify to the representative character of this bias. It is unlikely that even so determined a critic of the new social history as, say, Professor Elton, with his belief that history is 'about government', would want to repeat it today.

Despite the novelty of its subject matter, social history reproduces many of the characteristic biases of its predecessors. It is not difficult to find examples of displaced 'Whig' interpretation in 'modernisation' theory; or the 'idol of origins' in accounts of the rise of the Welfare State or the development of social movements. Social historians – proceeding, as Stubbs recommended a century ago, 'historically' rather than 'philosophically' – are no less susceptible than earlier scholars to the appeals of a commonsense empiricism in which the evidence appears to speak for itself, and explanation masquerades as the simple reproduction of fact. Many too could be said to be influenced, albeit subconsciously, by an aesthetic of 'naive realism' (something to which the present writer pleads guilty) in which the more detailed or 'thick' the description, the more authentic the picture is supposed to be. Social historians are good at amassing lifelike detail – household artefacts, time-budgets, ceremonial ritual: they leave no conceptual space for the great absences, for the many areas where the documentary record is silent, or where the historian holds no more than what Tawney once called 'the thin shrivelled tissue' in the hand.

Social history has the defects of its qualities. Its preference for 'human' documents and for close-up views have the effect of domesticating the subject matter of history, and rendering it – albeit unintentionally – harmless. The 'sharp eye for telling detail' on which practitioners pride themselves, the colloquial phrases they delight to turn up, the period 'atmosphere' they are at pains faithfully to evoke, all have the effect of confusing the picturesque and the lifelike with the essence of which it may be no more than a chance appearance (much the same defect can be seen on the 'background' detail of historical romance and costume drama). Whereas political history invites us to admire the giants of the past and even vicariously to share in their triumphs, its majesty reminds us of the heights we cannot scale. Social history establishes an altogether intimate rapport, inviting us back into the warm parlour of the past.

The indulgence which social historians extend towards their subjects, and the desire to establish 'empathy' – seeing the past in terms of its own values rather than those of today, can also serve to flatter our self-esteem, making history a field in which, at no great cost to ourselves, we can demonstrate our enlarged sympathies and benevolence. It also serves to rob history of all its terrors. The past is no longer another country when we find a rational core to seemingly irrational behaviour – e.g. that witchcraft accusations were a way of disburdening a village of superfluous old women; or that printers who massacred cats were engaging in a surrogate for a strike.

The identifications which social history invites – one of its leading inspirations and appeals – also have the effect of purveying symbolic reassurance. It establishes a too easy familiarity, the illusion that we are losing ourselves in the past when in fact we are using it for the projection of idea selves. Recognising our kinship to people in the past, and tracing, or discovering, their likeness to our selves, we are flattered in the belief that as the subliminal message of a well-known advert has it, underneath we are all lovable; eccentric perhaps and even absurd, but large-hearted generous and frank. Our very prejudices turn out to be endearing – or a any rate harmless – when they are revealed as quintessentially English. The people of the past thus become mirror images – or primitive versions of our ideal selves: the freeborn Englishman, as individualist to the manner born, acknowledging no man as his master, truculent in face of authority; the companionate family, 'a loved circle of familiar faces', living in nuclear households; the indulgent and affectionate parents, solicitous only for the happiness and well-being of their young. These identifications are almost always – albeit subliminally – self-congratulatory. They involve double misrecognition both of the people of the past and of ourselves, in the first place denying them their otherness, and the specificity of their existence in historical time; in the second reinforcing a sentimental view of ourselves. The imaginary community with the past can thus serve as a comfortable alternative to critical awareness and self-questioning, allowing us to borrow prestige from our adoptive ancestors, and to dignify the present by illegitimate association with the past.'

Social history, if it is to fulfill its subversive potential, needs to be a great deal more disturbing. If it is to celebrate a common humanity, and to bring past and present closer together, then it must take some account of those dissonances which we know of as part of our own experience – the fears that shadow the growing up of children, the pain of unrequited love, the hidden injuries of class, the ranklings of pride, the bitterness of faction and feud. Far more weight needs to be given, than the documents alone will yield, to the Malthusian condition of everyday life in the past and to the psychic effects of insecurities and emergencies which we can attempt to document, but which escape the categories of our experience, or the imaginative underpinning of our world view, 'Defamiliarisation', in short, may be more important for any kind of access to the past than a too precipitate intimacy. Perhaps too we might recognise – even if the recognition is a painful one – that there is a profound condescension in the notion of 'ordinary people' – that unified totality in which social historians are apt to deal. Implicitly it is a category from which we exclude ourselves, superior persons if only by our privilege of hindsight. 'There are... no masses', Raymond Williams wrote in Culture and Society, 'only ways of seeing people as masses'. It is perhaps time for historians to scrutinise the term 'the common people' in the same way.

‘Social history has to be thought out, as well as artfully presented, as a story, a moral tale, a belle-lettre or an essay in intellectual adventure’

Keith Hopkins was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge. His books include Conquerers and Slaves (1978), Death and Renewal (1983) and A World Full of Gods (1999)

A recently published papyrus from Roman Egypt, dating from the first or second century AD, contains an appeal by a slave owner to the authorities for compensation from the careless driver of a donkey, which had run over and seriously injured a young girl on her way to a singing lesson. In her plea, the appellant wrote: 

‘I loved and cared for this little servant-girl, a house-born slave, in the hope that when she grew up she would look after me in my old age, since I am a helpless woman and alone.’

This trivial but fascinating fragment encapsulates many of the problems we face in constructing a social history of the Roman world. First, status fundamentally affected every Roman's lifestyle and experience. It made a huge difference to be slave or free, rich or poor, young or old, male or female, a solitary widow or the head of a large household. Our consciousness of these status differences should undermine easy generalisations about the Romans as a whole. In this scepticism, I include the generalisations which follow.

Secondly, the whole of Roman society was bedevilled by high mortality, endemic illness and ineffective medicine. The young slave girl, incurably maimed, and the helpless widow were symptoms of a general experience of suffering and violence, against which many Romans defended themselves with a mixture of magic, cruelty and religion. The huge differences between typical modern life experiences and typical Roman experiences of life point up the difficulties of using empathy as a tactic of historical discovery. We cannot easily put ourselves in Roman sandals.

Thirdly, the opening story presents a paradox. The old slave-owner loved her slave; the young slave-girl was taking singing lessons. Both the emotion and the behaviour recorded violate our expectations. Surely that was not how Roman slave-owners normally felt or normally treated their slaves. Probably not. But we should be cautious about imposing our own prejudices and categories on to other societies. That way, we miss half the fun of studying history; that way we look into the past and see only ourselves.

Finally, as with the opening story, most of our evidence about Roman social life is fragmentary. Surviving sources provide only illustrative vignettes of daily life. Statistics, which are the bread and butter of modern social and economic history, are missing or, if they do survive, can rarely be trusted. The large gaps in our records highlight the social historian's obligation to reconstruct the past with imagination, even with artistic creativity, but constrained from flights of pure fantasy by the authenticating conventions of scholarship. Imagination is needed, not merely to fill the gaps in our sources, but also to provide the framework, the master picture into which the jigsaw fragments of evidence can be fitted.

Social history is not, or should not be, a blindly accumulated pile of facts (whatever they may be). It should not even be a quilt of testimony, however cunningly devised, each piece cut from abstruse sources. Social history has to be thought out, as well as artfully presented, as a story, a moral tale, a belle-lettre or an essay in intellectual adventure. It has to be thought out, because we interpret the past to the present. We cannot confine ourselves to the intentions and perceptions of historical actors. We know what they did not; we know what happened next. We should not throw that advantage away lightly.

We have to identify and to analyse long-term forces, the structure which moulded individual actions forces of which many actors were often only dimly aware: for example the growth of Christianity, or the increased costs of defending a large empire against barbarian attacks. And above all, the historian has to choose a topic that interests him and his readers. That is one reason why all history is contemporary history and repeatedly needs to be rewritten. We look into the past and inevitably write something about ourselves.

I began with a triviality – against my better judgement. Trivialities are what social history used to be about: clothes, hunting, sex, weddings, houses, eating, sleeping. For most people, in all periods, major preoccupations; but for serious historians, marginal matters compared with politics, laws, wars and foreign relation. Social history provided mere light relief, the tail-piece for proper history, just enough to convince the reader that the subject matter was human after all. Fashions have now changed. Social history occupies the centre of the historical stage, thanks to historians like Lawrence Stone, Le Roy Ladurie and Keith Thomas. And, thanks to the work of Norbert Elias, we can see changing habits of eating and lovemaking, not only as part of the cultural transformation of western civilisation, but also as a reflection of changes in the extent of state power. But that is sociological history, and another story.

‘Social history is not a particular kind of history; it is a dimension which should be present in every kind of history.’

John Breuilly is professor of nationalism and ethnicity at the London School of Economics. His books include Nationalism and State (1982), The Formation of the First German Nation-State 1800-1871 (1996) and Austria, Prussia and Germany, 1806–1871 (2002)

S ocial history is more difficult to define than political or economic or military history. Whereas those terms apply to the history of distinct kinds of activity, the term social covers virtually everything. In fact there have been three very different views about the nature of social history.

The oldest view of social history was that it was the history of manners, of leisure, of a whole range of social activities which were conducted outside political, economic, military and any other institutions which were the concern of specific kinds of history. One problem with this rather residual view of social history was that its domain shrank as historians of women, the family, leisure, education, etc., developed their own fields as distinct disciplines. There was also the danger that these histories could become trivialised by the exclusion of politics, economics or ideas from the activities they were investigating.

In a reaction against this some historians have gone to the other extreme and argued that social history should become the history of society: societal history. The idea is that political, economic, military and other specific types of history each study only one aspect of a society. It is necessary to bring these various types of history together into a single framework if that whole society is to be understood. This is the task of societal history.

There are many difficulties with this view of social history. First, the whole approach is based upon the assumption that there is a society to study. But when we use the term society we do not normally mean a distinct social structure, but rather the inhabitants of a certain territory or the subjects of a particular political authority. It remains to be established whether there is a distinct social structure which shapes the way these people live their lives. There is a danger that this assumption of a single society will be imposed upon the evidence. Thus the assumption that English society was becoming industrial during the nineteenth century, along with various ideas about what a pre-industrial and an industrial society are like, can distract from the proper task of the historian. Instead of describing and analysing specific events, the historian is lured into categorising various elements of 'society' according to where they are located on the path from pre-industrial to industrial. This 'evidence' is then cited in support of the original assumption. The argument is unhistorical, circular and empty of real meaning.

A much more promising way of bringing the different branches of history together into a single framework is to distinguish between different dimensions such as the political, the economic and the ideological. Then one tries to relate these different levels together. Marxist history is the best example of this kind of enterprise. But equally, the tradition associated with Max Weber can lead in the same direction although with important differences. In both cases, however, the central concern is no longer with 'society' but rather with other concepts such as 'mode of production' or 'types of legitimate domination'. It makes little sense to call these approaches examples of social or societal history. There may still be the assumption that the ultimate purpose is to understand 'society as a whole' or a 'social formation', but this assumption is not an essential element in these types of history. What is essential is how the different dimensions are defined and then related to the evidence and to one another.

A third view of social history is that it is concerned with experience rather than action. One might argue that people who are wage-earners, parents, citizens, consumers and much else besides must possess some sense of identity which underlies all these particular roles and must experience the world in ways which extend beyond these roles. The job of the social historian is to provide a general understanding not at the level of 'society as a whole' but at the level of the individual or the members of particular social groups.

But there are problems with this. All the historian can do is study the records of people's actions in the past which still exist. The temptation to go 'behind' those actions to the 'real' people can lead to unverifiable speculation. It can lead away from the concern with specific events which is the essence of history. Finally, it can lead away from the social into the psychological. The recent upsurge of interest in the history of 'everyday life' has sometimes demonstrated these weaknesses when it has sought to go beyond the rather antiquarian pursuit of bits and pieces of 'ordinary life'.

These three views of social history – as a residual history of assorted social activities, as societal history, and as the history of social experience – seem to lead nowhere. Confronted with much of what calls itself social history one might feel inclined to settle for this negative conclusion. But I think that at least for modern history there is a further point to be made.

Modern history has witnessed a dramatic increase in the scale of human activity with the growth in size and importance of markets, firms, states and other institutions. People relate to one another in these institutions with little in the way of a common sense of identity or personal knowledge of one another. The studies of these institutions tend, therefore, to omit a consideration of the ways individuals understand their actions within the institutions. But in the end those understandings determine how the institutions perform. By 'understanding' I do not mean some experience 'behind' what people do, but rather the thinking that directly and immediately informs their actions. It is this which should always be related to the performance of the institution as a whole. For example, the historical study of the 'adaptation' of rural immigrants to urban-industrial life cannot work either at the level of impersonal analysis (how far people adjust to certain 'imperatives' of modernisation) or at the level of individual experience (what it is like to be a rural immigrant). Rather one should look at distinct actions such as job-changing, absenteeism, patterns of settlement and housing use. Then one should ask what sort of thinking it is which gives a sense to these patterns of action as well as what this means for the institution concerned. This is hardly the province of a special sort of history. Rather it involves making every kind of history explicitly confront the social nature of action and institutions. Social history is not a particular kind of history; it is a dimension which should be present in every kind of history.

‘More and more historians are seeking to describe society as a whole, being no longer concerned exclusively either with the squirarchy or with the rootless poor’

Joyce Youings was Emeritus Professor of English Social History at the University of Exeter. Her books include Sixteenth Century England (1984).

W hile on a visit to a mid-western American university not long ago I was invited to 'tell us about the new social history'. Being somewhat at a loss, especially among faculty members whose own great-grandfathers had been among the creators of community life in pioneering times, I fell back on a discussion of the variety of overlapping early modern English communities: village, hamlet, parish and manor; county and 'country'; metropolis and market town; Anglican and Nonconformist congregations; universities and secular academic fraternities; guilds of craftsmen and ships' companies, and so on: the associations were many and varied. All of this seemed closer to the real world than consideration of 'mentalites' and even of 'total' societies and of the problems of quantification. However as a concession to the last of these I did contribute to the balance of payments by persuading my hosts to acquire not one but two copies of the new Population History of England .

'New' is of course a relative term. For those who today call themselves social historians but whose early training was in more specifically economic history, the present search for quantifiable data is a natural progression and the urge to encompass the whole of society no more than axiomatic. The advent of computers has undoubtedly played a part, not least in sending social historians in search of new source material, or to rework old sources, both of which can be made to yield hitherto undreamed-of results. Computers cannot, of course, write history, though from the evidence of some recent historical literature it would seem that they have a good try. Nothing can replace prolonged consideration of the records themselves and the problems of correctly identifying people in the past are enormous. Fortunately one of the effects of finding new uses for the parochial registration of baptisms, weddings and funerals has been the realisation that every living person has a unique identity and life-span. Indeed, what is the now very familiar 'family reconstitution' other than the rediscovery by historians of that most basic and universal human community? At the same time it must be admitted that the discoveries made by demographers about such things as age of marriage, size of families and birth control in early modern England have been nothing short of revolutionary.

There is no better way of charting recent trends in the study of social history than to consider the themes chosen for the annual conferences of the Social History Society. Under the leadership of Professor Harold Perkin the society has, since 1976, given a new direction to the subject while at the same time holding fast to real history rather than pursuing merely theoretical concepts of human activity. It has considered, usually with contributions from all periods of history, such topics as 'elites' (which have little to do with 'class'), 'crime, violence and social protest' (a meaningful combination of historical phenomena), 'the professions' (drawing on topics as diverse as classical lawyers and Victorian marine-engineers), 'work in its social aspects', 'popular culture' and, this year, 'sex and gender' which, although predictably attracting many specialists in women's studies, also led to a much broader consideration of the differing roles of men and women through the ages. Next year's theme, that of 'property', promises to produce an equally varied response.

Undoubtedly one of the strengths of social history today is the encouragement it has given to, and the response by specialists in such fields as the history of law and its enforcement, of medicine and its practice, of industry, commerce, shipping and seamanship, vernacular architecture, domestic furnishings, costume, the fine arts, music and, to a lesser extent, of literature, to provide for their subjects a social dimension. The vast output of political biography, including that concerned with Members of Parliament, testifies to the need felt by political and even constitutional historians for figures of flesh and blood. Not even Stubbs's Charters were compiled by mindless robots. Without the aid of such professional expertise social historians would lack access to all these activities which make up the totality of people's achievements. But even to read the relevant published work is a daunting task and this may well result in social historians taking refuge in ever-narrowing territorial and chronological confines. Indeed some are already doing so. This will at least serve to underline the need for precision, both of time and space. Not only change but also continuity need to be both dated and mapped, especially in a country as diverse in its human ecology as England.

The burgeoning of social history, especially during the last decade, has ensured that in the writing of general history people are now firmly in the foreground, their institutions mere reflections of the need to formalise and stabilise their relationships. More and more historians are seeking to describe society as a whole, being no longer concerned exclusively either with the squirarchy or with the rootless poor, with conspicuous consumption or with crises of subsistence. Cohesion is becoming as important as conflict. Social historians are, then, today's equivalent of the one-time honourable profession of general practitioners, whose only failing was that they concerned themselves with little besides national and international politics. In the best of today's textbooks social history is no longer reserved for an obligatory final chapter.

‘Social history is easier to defend than define’

Sir David Cannadine is Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, a visiting Professor of History at Oxford University, and the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. His books include Lords and Landlords: The Aristocracy and the Towns, 1774–1967 (1980), The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990) and Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (2001)

T he most famous definition of social history – always quoted, invariably criticised, and never fully understood - is that of G.M. Trevelyan, who began his English Social History by defining it as 'the history of the people with the politics left out.' Thus described and practised, social history has been much criticised – for its lack of acquaintance with social theory, for being too concerned with consensus and too little with conflict, for being a series of scenes rather than a serious study of change, for being little more than a nostalgic lament for a vanished world, and for selling so well that it was not merely social history, but a social phenomenon.

Yet, although most social historians today implicitly or explicitly reject Trevelyan's definition, and believe themselves to belong to a more professional, more rigorous, more recent tradition, those who read a little further in his book would be surprised by both the catholicity and contemporainety of his conception of the subject. To Trevelyan, spelling it out in more detail, social history encompassed the human as well as the economic relations of different classes, the character of family and household life, the conditions of labour and leisure, the attitude of man towards nature, and the cumulative influence of all these subjects on culture, including religion, architecture, literature, music, learning and thought.

This is a formidable and fashionable list. Of course, there was not much sign of such subjects in Trevelyan's own works of synthesis, as the necessary research had not yet been done. And it would be unrealistic and ahistorical to credit him with too much clairvoyance. But in drawing attention to such an agenda of research interests, he certainly anticipated the work of such major scholars of our own day as Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Lawrence Stone, Le Roy Ladurie, Keith Thomas and Peter Laslett. Ironically, the last great practitioner of the old social history was one of the first to foresee the scope and shape of the new.

So Trevelyan might well be pleased with the massive expansion in social history which took place in the three decades since the Second World War and the writing of his most famous book. There is a Social History Society and a Social History journal (to say nothing of Past & Present and History Workshop); almost every reputable publisher seems to have a new social history of England in the course of preparation; many British universities offer social history courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level; and it is a highly popular subject in schools, in extra-mural studies, and on television. In addition, a whole variety of allied subjects – urban history, women's history, family history, the history of crime, of childhood, of education – are its near relatives, each with their own societies, journals and conferences.

But growth can be as disquieting as exhilarating. For as social history becomes more vast and varied, it becomes harder to keep up with it all, and more difficult to define it in any way other than descriptively. Some of its critics (most of whom, incidentally, have never tried their hands at it) condemn it for being no more than an extension of Trevelyan's laundry list, an inchoate amalgam of fashionable fads. Others deride it as a new form of antiquarianism, celebrating 'experience' but eschewing 'explanation'. In reply, its foremost champions (who are not necessarily its foremost practitioners) defend it as an autonomous sub-discipline, intellectually coherent and organisationally confident, offering the best opportunities for the writing of the total history to which, ultimately, we should all aspire.

As with all debates on 'what is history?', most viewpoints are partially valid, few entirely convincing. The real problem with social history, whether done by Trevelyan or anyone else, is that it lacks a hard intellectual centre. Political history is primarily about power, and economic history about money. So, surely, in the same way, social history is about class? Yes, but what is class? And where is it? There is no theoretical agreement as to its nature; it can barely be said to have existed, even in the western world, before the Industrial Revolution; and too often, social historians spend all their time looking for it, and do not know what to do with it if they find it.

Defining social history is never easy, just as splitting the hairs of Clio's raiment is hard to avoid. In the halcyon days of the 1960s and early 1970s, expansion, proliferation and subdivision were the order of the day, in history as in most other subjects. And of this development, social history was the prime beneficiary. But now retrenchment is upon us; in history as in everything else, amalgamation and rationalisation are in the ascendant; and there are fears that social history, having gained most in the era of expansion, will now suffer most in the age of austerity.

It seems possible, yet unlikely. For social history is surely easier to defend than to define. And in any case, the best social history, whatever it is, is always more than merely that, and it, most illustrious practitioners rightly spend more time doing it than defining it. Considering the fate of Trevelyan's misunderstood definition one can hardly blame them. We would be well advised to follow their example, and get on with it.

‘It is less a terrain of historical enquiry than a means of conducting one’

Royden Harrison was Professor Emeritus of Social History at the University of Warwick. His books include Before The Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861–1881 (1965), The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 1858-1905: The Formative Years (1991), and as editor, The Independent Collier: The Coal Miner as Archetypal Proletarian Reconsidered (1978)

A penalty of taking early retirement is that one's literary output is expected to soar. It is not surprising that my progress reports are received with a mixture of pity and scorn. But is interesting that they should be the subject of a great deal of confusion.

When I remark that my 'authorised’ Life of Sidney and Beatrice Webb is nearly ready: announce that my monograph on Bertrand Russell, Liberalism and Socialism is already in publication: declare that my Notes on the Historical Outcome of Karl Marx is finished, even if incomprehensible,: I am told: 'that's not social history'! Few people may know what social history is, but they are very sure about what it is not. It is not biography. Biography is about one person. Social history has got to be about more than one person. Moreover, the persons it's about have got to have been unheard of and be of no political importance. Disturbed by the astuteness of this interrogation, I reach out for one last manuscript. With the collaboration of some of my former students I have written a book called Divisions of Labour . It is a series of studies of the play between technical innovation and craft regulation in a number of British trades and industries between 1850 and 1914. Most of my questioners find this reassuring. This is what they expected of social history. (Besides, it might even be 'relevant'.) Alas! The more knowing ask whether this is not rather old-hat social history. They were under the impression that social history had outgrown labour history.

The short and superior answer is that social history has outgrown more than labour history. It has outgrown all the other historical subcultures. One is making a category mistake one tries to think of social history as if it was an area of enquiry. It is not logically similar to political or military, ecclesiastical or diplomatic, imperial or economic history. It is less a terrain of historical enquiry than a means of conducting one. At its very least it is what Professor Harold Perkin claimed for it, when he made its concern gathering 'the sap of the social' where ever it might be found. (The phrase may be unfortunate, but the notion is important,) For a time, as a matter of historiographical fact, social history may have had to stand up for fledgling enterprises such as labour or demographic history. But beyond such transitory duties there is an enduring task. It must aid in the desegregation of all the true historical sub-cultures. Thus, military history ought not to be focused exclusively on armaments, strategies and tactics. It ought – and it increasingly does – look at armies in terms of their social composition: their hierarchies in their relation to larger social divisions: their functions in relation to the civil power and so forth. In short, social history has not got its own agenda. At its best it extends the agendas of the specialised historians. It encourages them to speak to each other and occasionally to nod in the direction of the social historian himself.

However, there are some social historians who feel that going after 'the sap of the social' is too modest a function. They suspect that in practice it will consign them to the role of scavengers or beachcombers sorting through the junk which 'Historians Properly So-Called' have thrown out. While agreeing that social history is not just another sub-culture they if want it to insist that its programme is nothing less than writing the history of society. If economic history ought to be the economics of the past then social history ought to be the sociology of the past – and sociology ought to be understood in the most all-encompassing way. It is a fact that a more and more social historians have moved out of the protective shade of economic history in favour of closer association with anthropology and sociology. This has often proved fruitful, Yet sociology is simply not in the sort of shape which would make this ultimate programme remotely realisable in the near future. Imagine what it would have been like to have tried to make economic history the economics of the past in the days when Alfred Marshall ruled. Marshall was far too interested in the economics of the firm or the industry under conditions of static equilibrium to have been of much use to the historian, except in points of detail. Despite its considerable achievements, contemporary sociology is in an even less satisfactory state. And even if this was not so, a social science seeking to discover statistical regularities will never be able wholly to assimilate history, which must be concerned with recovering unique experiences in their chronological sequence.

When I was conscripted into the ranks of social history as E.P. Thompson's successor at the University of Warwick, I assumed that my first duty was not to write some approved form of social history myself but to create the conditions under which others might write it. This meant sustaining Thompson's challenge to what he called the 'artisanal' tradition in historian's research culture. It meant opposing miscellany, isolation, and loneliness in historical research. One important sense of social history is that it does tend, whether it is pursued at Cambridge, Warwick or Oxford (Ruskin) to be more social and less individualistic in its ways of carrying on. This is not easily achieved. It means encouraging good students to go elsewhere because their interests don't fit into any of your concentrated and inter- related research areas. It means bringing primary sources to your own doorstep so that your students don't have to spend all their time in London (The Modern Research Centre at Warwick). It means doing it in a way which takes constructive account of the legitimate interests of existing archivists. It means producing tools of the trade such as the Warwick Guide to British Labour Periodicals (1977): drudgery for which one gets little thanks and less recognition. It means getting staff and students to come together in literary co-operatives to produce books such as Albion's Fatal Tree (1975), the Independent Collier (1978) and Divisions of Labour (1985). It may be a pleasure to teach the Economic and Social Science Research Council that its distinction between money for 'teaching' and money for 'research' is meaningless, but the social production of social history is a very arduous business.

‘Social history is made to seem the sort of history that socialists write’

J.C.D. Clark is Professor Emeritus of British History at the University of Kansas. His books include The Dynamics of Change: the Crisis of the 1750s and English Party Systems (1982), English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (1985) and Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1986)

W hat is social history? The question used to be asked differently: what is history tout court? Philosophers laboured to defend the viability of 'historical explanation' as such against the claims of the natural or social sciences. Yet practising historians know that history is not one thing, but many things. University history faculties are battlefields where different sorts of history compete for space, each sort equipped with a different methodology and value-system. Social history is a natural loser in such a contest: its nature isn't obvious. In rough but useful terms, politics generates political history, war outlines military history, churchmanship identifies religious history. But 'social history' seems a portmanteau term: 'social' action is too general to define an academic genre. So the debate is partly semantic (shall we call this or that sort of history 'social'?), partly a search for a Holy Grail (is there a holistic social history which transcends and incorporates everything else?). Despite Harold Perkin's impressive achievement, this last idea hasn't been generally persuasive, any more than Leavis' attempt to turn literary criticism into the holistic study in the arts.

Social historians are still divided. So what is the semantic debate? What are the divisions? I must answer for my own field, England between the Restoration and the Reform Bill. First in time, but still influential, were the' Fabians and Marxists of the pre-1945 generations: the Webbs, the Hammonds, Wallas, Cole, Laski, Tawney and their modern successors. For them, social history was small-scale economic history: standard of living, enclosures, transport, public health, poor law, the economically-generated categories of 'class', municipal matters, drains. It was worthy, but now seems desperately Attlee-esque. And why was this different from economic history as such? On the basis of their reductionist methodologies, no distinction was possible. Nor was it possible in the work, secondly, of subsequent cohorts of New Left historians, writing on radicalism, popular protest, riots, crime, prisons, revolution, 'social control'. The structure of the argument was the same: Roy Porter's concept of social history in English Society in the Eighteenth Century is identical to Christopher Hill's concept of economic history in Reformation to Industrial Revolution . R.W. Malcolmson's Life and Labour in England 1700-1780 still touches its forelock to Marx and Engels. One sense in which this work approaches the holistic is that social history is made to seem the sort of history that socialists write.

The third party in the semantic debate seeks to break this closed shop by building its research on a non-positivist, anti-reductionist methodology. Emancipated from its servitude to economic history, social history might be reformulated as the historical sociology of power, ideology and belief, of structure, cohesion, allegiance, faith and identity as well as of innovation and dissent. If politics and ideology (rather than economics) are used to provide a framework for social history, three things, conventionally ignored, would be placed at the top of the social historian's agenda in 1660-1832: religion; the aristocracy and gentry; the monarchy. Social structure, seen in non-positivist terms, highlights England as an ancien regime state, with a dominant Church, a clerical intelligentsia, an elite defined in cultural, not economic, terms, and as a polity from which 'liberal(ism)' and 'radical(ism)' as political nouns were appropriately absent. Too often, the period still takes its chronology from economic history: 1660-1760 is a desert; 1760 onwards is dominated by a reified Industrial Revolution (with invariable capitals), a category discredited by the 'new' economic history. Church history is still a neglected specialism, like military and naval history; the universities are ignored until the era of reform; studies of the aristocracy and gentry are still mainly studies of land-ownership.

We all know (after all, J.H. Plumb's generation said so) that England from 1688 was secular, contractarian, Lockeian, a world made safe for bourgeois individualism. The 'new' social history will replace this model with an England distressingly different in its priorities from those of the 1960s intelligentsia, so bridging the adjacent achievements of Laslett, Schochet, Thomas, Perkin, Moore. It seems easier for outsiders, free from our parochial commitments: Alan Heimert, Bernard Semmel, Gordon Schochet, Alan Gilbert, Rhys Isaac on religion and society put their English colleagues to shame. Is this social history? Partly the question is semantic, but more is at stake in the clash of materialist and idealist methodologies, and the cultural hegemonies that academic debates echo. Semantic debates matter little; methodologies, which set the agenda, matter greatly. In respect of the social history of 1660-1832, Englishmen are still burdened with a world-view appropriate to the days when cotton was spun in Manchester, ships built on Clydeside, and coal mined for profit in South Wales.

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Social History by Peter N. Stearns LAST REVIEWED: 28 July 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 28 July 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0131

Many historians contributed to what is now social history before the mid-20th century, but as a field social history was increasingly precisely defined beginning in the 1930s in France (as part of the Annales school), and from the 1960s in the English-speaking world. (Indeed, for several decades the field seemed so innovative that it was regularly termed the “new” social history.) The field has two foci. First, social history emphasizes large numbers of people in the past, rather than just elites or leading individuals. Common categories include social classes, Gender , Race and ethnic group, and age. Social historians see the history of ordinary people as contributing greatly to an understanding of the past, and often they argue that ordinary people display more independent initiative than was commonly assumed by conventional historians. Often some tension emerges between a focus on groups of ordinary people as targets of mistreatment and the claims of more active agency. Second, and closely linked originally to the focus on ordinary people, social historians analyze a variety of aspects of human and social behavior. They reject the tendency of conventional historians to concentrate heavily on formal politics, diplomacy, and great ideas alone. This aspect of social history has expanded steadily. It leads to a host of subfields, including family and childhood, leisure and consumerism, health and disease, and crime, and the list continues to grow as historians respond to changing social patterns and needs. Some tension has developed between interest in a wider range of topics and the earlier commitment to ordinary people, as some new topics are best explored, at least initially, through elite or middle-class sources. Social history’s topical range has also fueled complaints about a lack of overall coherence, though social historians frequently organize their many topics around major developments like industrialization. Many historians identified themselves strongly as social historians during the early decades of the field’s emergence. This singular identification has softened over time, and many historians in the early 21st century “do” social history as part of a larger commitment, usually to a geographical region. Social history has also drawn different levels of attention in various world regions. The field is better developed, for example, in China or the West than in the Middle East. Finally, social historical work has often, but not always, developed with some interdisciplinary connections, particularly to historical sociology.

An excellent way to gain a sense of the social history field is to explore one or more of the founding studies that emerged over several decades. Many continue to serve as basic reference points, even as the field has increasingly divided into more specialized research areas. Bloch 1966 conveys some of the core strengths of the Annales approach, which helped launch the field in terms of research and analysis. Hosbawm 1965 and Handlin 1952 focus on similarly basic work in the fields of social protest and immigration, respectively. Fogel and Engerman 1974 generated wide debate over the history of slavery and also shows the importance of quantitative techniques in the field. Demos 1970 is a pioneering work of another sort, in the exploration of family history and related topics. Thomas 1971 is a magisterial treatment of cultural change at the societal level.

Bloch, Marc. 1966. French rural history: An essay on its basic characteristics . Translated by Janet Sondheimer. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Originally published in 1931, this was a basic contribution to the understanding of French agricultural society in the Middle Ages, by one of the cofounders of the Annales approach. Bloch focused on the importance of technology in rural life, and the peasant community structure that grew up around the introduction of a distinctive plow. He also strongly emphasized the region—in this case, the north of France—as a basic unit for social analysis.

Demos, John. 1970. A little commonwealth: Family life in Plymouth Colony . New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Demos was one of several colonial historians who burst on the scene in the early 1970s, establishing the centrality of family history to the social history field but also a particular approach to family history that did less with household structure and quantitative data (in some contrast to Laslett’s approach; see Laslett 1983 , cited under General Overviews ), and more with a qualitative assessment, including the nature of family relationships. The range of topics Demos explored prefigured important subsequent extensions of social history.

Fogel, Robert, and Stanley Engerman. 1974. Time on the cross: The economics of American Negro slavery . 2 vols. New York: W. W. Norton.

This study used the kind of quantitative data becoming dominant in economic history to explore the profitability and conditions of the American slave system. The book challenged earlier analyses that had held slavery unprofitable and likely to decline, insisting that a more scientific and quantitative approach produced quite a different interpretation. The book caused great controversy because of findings that slave owners may not have treated their slaves quite as badly, from a material standpoint, as had been thought.

Handlin, Oscar. 1952. The uprooted: The epic story of the great migrations that made the American people . Boston: Little, Brown.

Handlin was not the first historian to deal with the history of immigration, but he unquestionably elevated and extended it, ultimately inspiring a torrent of research in American social history. The book combined fascinating data from immigrants themselves, and wider social inquiries, with considerable passion on the part of the author, himself the son of immigrants.

Hosbawm, Eric. 1965. Primitive rebels: Studies in archaic forms of social movement in the 19th and 20th centuries . New York: W. W. Norton.

This study focused on the goals, composition, and impact of largely peasant bands, whose risings predated more “organized” social protest and operated independently of more formal revolutions. The book inspired considerable additional research, and contributed as well to persuasive historical models about the evolution of popular protest over time. Case studies concentrated particularly on southern Europe, but the approach has been extended to eastern Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere.

Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the decline of magic . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Thomas offers a pioneering analysis of the many factors that contributed to a shift away from popular beliefs in magic, embracing religion, science, and changing social relations. The findings are important in themselves, and they also offer a model for the analysis of major cultural change.

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A case study research paper examines a person, place, event, condition, phenomenon, or other type of subject of analysis in order to extrapolate  key themes and results that help predict future trends, illuminate previously hidden issues that can be applied to practice, and/or provide a means for understanding an important research problem with greater clarity. A case study research paper usually examines a single subject of analysis, but case study papers can also be designed as a comparative investigation that shows relationships between two or more subjects. The methods used to study a case can rest within a quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-method investigative paradigm.

Case Studies. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University; Mills, Albert J. , Gabrielle Durepos, and Eiden Wiebe, editors. Encyclopedia of Case Study Research . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2010 ; “What is a Case Study?” In Swanborn, Peter G. Case Study Research: What, Why and How? London: SAGE, 2010.

How to Approach Writing a Case Study Research Paper

General information about how to choose a topic to investigate can be found under the " Choosing a Research Problem " tab in the Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper writing guide. Review this page because it may help you identify a subject of analysis that can be investigated using a case study design.

However, identifying a case to investigate involves more than choosing the research problem . A case study encompasses a problem contextualized around the application of in-depth analysis, interpretation, and discussion, often resulting in specific recommendations for action or for improving existing conditions. As Seawright and Gerring note, practical considerations such as time and access to information can influence case selection, but these issues should not be the sole factors used in describing the methodological justification for identifying a particular case to study. Given this, selecting a case includes considering the following:

• The case represents an unusual or atypical example of a research problem that requires more in-depth analysis? Cases often represent a topic that rests on the fringes of prior investigations because the case may provide new ways of understanding the research problem. For example, if the research problem is to identify strategies to improve policies that support girl's access to secondary education in predominantly Muslim nations, you could consider using Azerbaijan as a case study rather than selecting a more obvious nation in the Middle East. Doing so may reveal important new insights into recommending how governments in other predominantly Muslim nations can formulate policies that support improved access to education for girls.
• The case provides important insight or illuminate a previously hidden problem? In-depth analysis of a case can be based on the hypothesis that the case study will reveal trends or issues that have not been exposed in prior research or will reveal new and important implications for practice. For example, anecdotal evidence may suggest drug use among homeless veterans is related to their patterns of travel throughout the day. Assuming prior studies have not looked at individual travel choices as a way to study access to illicit drug use, a case study that observes a homeless veteran could reveal how issues of personal mobility choices facilitate regular access to illicit drugs. Note that it is important to conduct a thorough literature review to ensure that your assumption about the need to reveal new insights or previously hidden problems is valid and evidence-based.
• The case challenges and offers a counter-point to prevailing assumptions? Over time, research on any given topic can fall into a trap of developing assumptions based on outdated studies that are still applied to new or changing conditions or the idea that something should simply be accepted as "common sense," even though the issue has not been thoroughly tested in current practice. A case study analysis may offer an opportunity to gather evidence that challenges prevailing assumptions about a research problem and provide a new set of recommendations applied to practice that have not been tested previously. For example, perhaps there has been a long practice among scholars to apply a particular theory in explaining the relationship between two subjects of analysis. Your case could challenge this assumption by applying an innovative theoretical framework [perhaps borrowed from another discipline] to explore whether this approach offers new ways of understanding the research problem. Taking a contrarian stance is one of the most important ways that new knowledge and understanding develops from existing literature.
• The case provides an opportunity to pursue action leading to the resolution of a problem? Another way to think about choosing a case to study is to consider how the results from investigating a particular case may result in findings that reveal ways in which to resolve an existing or emerging problem. For example, studying the case of an unforeseen incident, such as a fatal accident at a railroad crossing, can reveal hidden issues that could be applied to preventative measures that contribute to reducing the chance of accidents in the future. In this example, a case study investigating the accident could lead to a better understanding of where to strategically locate additional signals at other railroad crossings so as to better warn drivers of an approaching train, particularly when visibility is hindered by heavy rain, fog, or at night.
• The case offers a new direction in future research? A case study can be used as a tool for an exploratory investigation that highlights the need for further research about the problem. A case can be used when there are few studies that help predict an outcome or that establish a clear understanding about how best to proceed in addressing a problem. For example, after conducting a thorough literature review [very important!], you discover that little research exists showing the ways in which women contribute to promoting water conservation in rural communities of east central Africa. A case study of how women contribute to saving water in a rural village of Uganda can lay the foundation for understanding the need for more thorough research that documents how women in their roles as cooks and family caregivers think about water as a valuable resource within their community. This example of a case study could also point to the need for scholars to build new theoretical frameworks around the topic [e.g., applying feminist theories of work and family to the issue of water conservation].

Eisenhardt, Kathleen M. “Building Theories from Case Study Research.” Academy of Management Review 14 (October 1989): 532-550; Emmel, Nick. Sampling and Choosing Cases in Qualitative Research: A Realist Approach . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2013; Gerring, John. “What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good for?” American Political Science Review 98 (May 2004): 341-354; Mills, Albert J. , Gabrielle Durepos, and Eiden Wiebe, editors. Encyclopedia of Case Study Research . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2010; Seawright, Jason and John Gerring. "Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research." Political Research Quarterly 61 (June 2008): 294-308.

Structure and Writing Style

The purpose of a paper in the social sciences designed around a case study is to thoroughly investigate a subject of analysis in order to reveal a new understanding about the research problem and, in so doing, contributing new knowledge to what is already known from previous studies. In applied social sciences disciplines [e.g., education, social work, public administration, etc.], case studies may also be used to reveal best practices, highlight key programs, or investigate interesting aspects of professional work.

In general, the structure of a case study research paper is not all that different from a standard college-level research paper. However, there are subtle differences you should be aware of. Here are the key elements to organizing and writing a case study research paper.

I.  Introduction

As with any research paper, your introduction should serve as a roadmap for your readers to ascertain the scope and purpose of your study . The introduction to a case study research paper, however, should not only describe the research problem and its significance, but you should also succinctly describe why the case is being used and how it relates to addressing the problem. The two elements should be linked. With this in mind, a good introduction answers these four questions:

• What is being studied? Describe the research problem and describe the subject of analysis [the case] you have chosen to address the problem. Explain how they are linked and what elements of the case will help to expand knowledge and understanding about the problem.
• Why is this topic important to investigate? Describe the significance of the research problem and state why a case study design and the subject of analysis that the paper is designed around is appropriate in addressing the problem.
• What did we know about this topic before I did this study? Provide background that helps lead the reader into the more in-depth literature review to follow. If applicable, summarize prior case study research applied to the research problem and why it fails to adequately address the problem. Describe why your case will be useful. If no prior case studies have been used to address the research problem, explain why you have selected this subject of analysis.
• How will this study advance new knowledge or new ways of understanding? Explain why your case study will be suitable in helping to expand knowledge and understanding about the research problem.

Each of these questions should be addressed in no more than a few paragraphs. Exceptions to this can be when you are addressing a complex research problem or subject of analysis that requires more in-depth background information.

II.  Literature Review

The literature review for a case study research paper is generally structured the same as it is for any college-level research paper. The difference, however, is that the literature review is focused on providing background information and  enabling historical interpretation of the subject of analysis in relation to the research problem the case is intended to address . This includes synthesizing studies that help to:

• Place relevant works in the context of their contribution to understanding the case study being investigated . This would involve summarizing studies that have used a similar subject of analysis to investigate the research problem. If there is literature using the same or a very similar case to study, you need to explain why duplicating past research is important [e.g., conditions have changed; prior studies were conducted long ago, etc.].
• Describe the relationship each work has to the others under consideration that informs the reader why this case is applicable . Your literature review should include a description of any works that support using the case to investigate the research problem and the underlying research questions.
• Identify new ways to interpret prior research using the case study . If applicable, review any research that has examined the research problem using a different research design. Explain how your use of a case study design may reveal new knowledge or a new perspective or that can redirect research in an important new direction.
• Resolve conflicts amongst seemingly contradictory previous studies . This refers to synthesizing any literature that points to unresolved issues of concern about the research problem and describing how the subject of analysis that forms the case study can help resolve these existing contradictions.
• Point the way in fulfilling a need for additional research . Your review should examine any literature that lays a foundation for understanding why your case study design and the subject of analysis around which you have designed your study may reveal a new way of approaching the research problem or offer a perspective that points to the need for additional research.
• Expose any gaps that exist in the literature that the case study could help to fill . Summarize any literature that not only shows how your subject of analysis contributes to understanding the research problem, but how your case contributes to a new way of understanding the problem that prior research has failed to do.
• Locate your own research within the context of existing literature [very important!] . Collectively, your literature review should always place your case study within the larger domain of prior research about the problem. The overarching purpose of reviewing pertinent literature in a case study paper is to demonstrate that you have thoroughly identified and synthesized prior studies in relation to explaining the relevance of the case in addressing the research problem.

III.  Method

In this section, you explain why you selected a particular case [i.e., subject of analysis] and the strategy you used to identify and ultimately decide that your case was appropriate in addressing the research problem. The way you describe the methods used varies depending on the type of subject of analysis that constitutes your case study.

If your subject of analysis is an incident or event . In the social and behavioral sciences, the event or incident that represents the case to be studied is usually bounded by time and place, with a clear beginning and end and with an identifiable location or position relative to its surroundings. The subject of analysis can be a rare or critical event or it can focus on a typical or regular event. The purpose of studying a rare event is to illuminate new ways of thinking about the broader research problem or to test a hypothesis. Critical incident case studies must describe the method by which you identified the event and explain the process by which you determined the validity of this case to inform broader perspectives about the research problem or to reveal new findings. However, the event does not have to be a rare or uniquely significant to support new thinking about the research problem or to challenge an existing hypothesis. For example, Walo, Bull, and Breen conducted a case study to identify and evaluate the direct and indirect economic benefits and costs of a local sports event in the City of Lismore, New South Wales, Australia. The purpose of their study was to provide new insights from measuring the impact of a typical local sports event that prior studies could not measure well because they focused on large "mega-events." Whether the event is rare or not, the methods section should include an explanation of the following characteristics of the event: a) when did it take place; b) what were the underlying circumstances leading to the event; and, c) what were the consequences of the event in relation to the research problem.

If your subject of analysis is a person. Explain why you selected this particular individual to be studied and describe what experiences they have had that provide an opportunity to advance new understandings about the research problem. Mention any background about this person which might help the reader understand the significance of their experiences that make them worthy of study. This includes describing the relationships this person has had with other people, institutions, and/or events that support using them as the subject for a case study research paper. It is particularly important to differentiate the person as the subject of analysis from others and to succinctly explain how the person relates to examining the research problem [e.g., why is one politician in a particular local election used to show an increase in voter turnout from any other candidate running in the election]. Note that these issues apply to a specific group of people used as a case study unit of analysis [e.g., a classroom of students].

If your subject of analysis is a place. In general, a case study that investigates a place suggests a subject of analysis that is unique or special in some way and that this uniqueness can be used to build new understanding or knowledge about the research problem. A case study of a place must not only describe its various attributes relevant to the research problem [e.g., physical, social, historical, cultural, economic, political], but you must state the method by which you determined that this place will illuminate new understandings about the research problem. It is also important to articulate why a particular place as the case for study is being used if similar places also exist [i.e., if you are studying patterns of homeless encampments of veterans in open spaces, explain why you are studying Echo Park in Los Angeles rather than Griffith Park?]. If applicable, describe what type of human activity involving this place makes it a good choice to study [e.g., prior research suggests Echo Park has more homeless veterans].

If your subject of analysis is a phenomenon. A phenomenon refers to a fact, occurrence, or circumstance that can be studied or observed but with the cause or explanation to be in question. In this sense, a phenomenon that forms your subject of analysis can encompass anything that can be observed or presumed to exist but is not fully understood. In the social and behavioral sciences, the case usually focuses on human interaction within a complex physical, social, economic, cultural, or political system. For example, the phenomenon could be the observation that many vehicles used by ISIS fighters are small trucks with English language advertisements on them. The research problem could be that ISIS fighters are difficult to combat because they are highly mobile. The research questions could be how and by what means are these vehicles used by ISIS being supplied to the militants and how might supply lines to these vehicles be cut off? How might knowing the suppliers of these trucks reveal larger networks of collaborators and financial support? A case study of a phenomenon most often encompasses an in-depth analysis of a cause and effect that is grounded in an interactive relationship between people and their environment in some way.

NOTE:   The choice of the case or set of cases to study cannot appear random. Evidence that supports the method by which you identified and chose your subject of analysis should clearly support investigation of the research problem and linked to key findings from your literature review. Be sure to cite any studies that helped you determine that the case you chose was appropriate for examining the problem.

IV.  Discussion

The main elements of your discussion section are generally the same as any research paper, but centered around interpreting and drawing conclusions about the key findings from your analysis of the case study. Note that a general social sciences research paper may contain a separate section to report findings. However, in a paper designed around a case study, it is common to combine a description of the results with the discussion about their implications. The objectives of your discussion section should include the following:

Reiterate the Research Problem/State the Major Findings Briefly reiterate the research problem you are investigating and explain why the subject of analysis around which you designed the case study were used. You should then describe the findings revealed from your study of the case using direct, declarative, and succinct proclamation of the study results. Highlight any findings that were unexpected or especially profound.

Explain the Meaning of the Findings and Why They are Important Systematically explain the meaning of your case study findings and why you believe they are important. Begin this part of the section by repeating what you consider to be your most important or surprising finding first, then systematically review each finding. Be sure to thoroughly extrapolate what your analysis of the case can tell the reader about situations or conditions beyond the actual case that was studied while, at the same time, being careful not to misconstrue or conflate a finding that undermines the external validity of your conclusions.

Relate the Findings to Similar Studies No study in the social sciences is so novel or possesses such a restricted focus that it has absolutely no relation to previously published research. The discussion section should relate your case study results to those found in other studies, particularly if questions raised from prior studies served as the motivation for choosing your subject of analysis. This is important because comparing and contrasting the findings of other studies helps support the overall importance of your results and it highlights how and in what ways your case study design and the subject of analysis differs from prior research about the topic.

Consider Alternative Explanations of the Findings Remember that the purpose of social science research is to discover and not to prove. When writing the discussion section, you should carefully consider all possible explanations revealed by the case study results, rather than just those that fit your hypothesis or prior assumptions and biases. Be alert to what the in-depth analysis of the case may reveal about the research problem, including offering a contrarian perspective to what scholars have stated in prior research if that is how the findings can be interpreted from your case.

Acknowledge the Study's Limitations You can state the study's limitations in the conclusion section of your paper but describing the limitations of your subject of analysis in the discussion section provides an opportunity to identify the limitations and explain why they are not significant. This part of the discussion section should also note any unanswered questions or issues your case study could not address. More detailed information about how to document any limitations to your research can be found here .

Suggest Areas for Further Research Although your case study may offer important insights about the research problem, there are likely additional questions related to the problem that remain unanswered or findings that unexpectedly revealed themselves as a result of your in-depth analysis of the case. Be sure that the recommendations for further research are linked to the research problem and that you explain why your recommendations are valid in other contexts and based on the original assumptions of your study.

V.  Conclusion

As with any research paper, you should summarize your conclusion in clear, simple language; emphasize how the findings from your case study differs from or supports prior research and why. Do not simply reiterate the discussion section. Provide a synthesis of key findings presented in the paper to show how these converge to address the research problem. If you haven't already done so in the discussion section, be sure to document the limitations of your case study and any need for further research.

The function of your paper's conclusion is to: 1) reiterate the main argument supported by the findings from your case study; 2) state clearly the context, background, and necessity of pursuing the research problem using a case study design in relation to an issue, controversy, or a gap found from reviewing the literature; and, 3) provide a place to persuasively and succinctly restate the significance of your research problem, given that the reader has now been presented with in-depth information about the topic.

Consider the following points to help ensure your conclusion is appropriate:

• If the argument or purpose of your paper is complex, you may need to summarize these points for your reader.
• If prior to your conclusion, you have not yet explained the significance of your findings or if you are proceeding inductively, use the conclusion of your paper to describe your main points and explain their significance.
• Move from a detailed to a general level of consideration of the case study's findings that returns the topic to the context provided by the introduction or within a new context that emerges from your case study findings.

Note that, depending on the discipline you are writing in or the preferences of your professor, the concluding paragraph may contain your final reflections on the evidence presented as it applies to practice or on the essay's central research problem. However, the nature of being introspective about the subject of analysis you have investigated will depend on whether you are explicitly asked to express your observations in this way.

Problems to Avoid

Overgeneralization One of the goals of a case study is to lay a foundation for understanding broader trends and issues applied to similar circumstances. However, be careful when drawing conclusions from your case study. They must be evidence-based and grounded in the results of the study; otherwise, it is merely speculation. Looking at a prior example, it would be incorrect to state that a factor in improving girls access to education in Azerbaijan and the policy implications this may have for improving access in other Muslim nations is due to girls access to social media if there is no documentary evidence from your case study to indicate this. There may be anecdotal evidence that retention rates were better for girls who were engaged with social media, but this observation would only point to the need for further research and would not be a definitive finding if this was not a part of your original research agenda.

Failure to Document Limitations No case is going to reveal all that needs to be understood about a research problem. Therefore, just as you have to clearly state the limitations of a general research study , you must describe the specific limitations inherent in the subject of analysis. For example, the case of studying how women conceptualize the need for water conservation in a village in Uganda could have limited application in other cultural contexts or in areas where fresh water from rivers or lakes is plentiful and, therefore, conservation is understood more in terms of managing access rather than preserving access to a scarce resource.

Failure to Extrapolate All Possible Implications Just as you don't want to over-generalize from your case study findings, you also have to be thorough in the consideration of all possible outcomes or recommendations derived from your findings. If you do not, your reader may question the validity of your analysis, particularly if you failed to document an obvious outcome from your case study research. For example, in the case of studying the accident at the railroad crossing to evaluate where and what types of warning signals should be located, you failed to take into consideration speed limit signage as well as warning signals. When designing your case study, be sure you have thoroughly addressed all aspects of the problem and do not leave gaps in your analysis that leave the reader questioning the results.

Case Studies. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University; Gerring, John. Case Study Research: Principles and Practices . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Merriam, Sharan B. Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education . Rev. ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1998; Miller, Lisa L. “The Use of Case Studies in Law and Social Science Research.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 14 (2018): TBD; Mills, Albert J., Gabrielle Durepos, and Eiden Wiebe, editors. Encyclopedia of Case Study Research . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2010; Putney, LeAnn Grogan. "Case Study." In Encyclopedia of Research Design , Neil J. Salkind, editor. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2010), pp. 116-120; Simons, Helen. Case Study Research in Practice . London: SAGE Publications, 2009;  Kratochwill,  Thomas R. and Joel R. Levin, editors. Single-Case Research Design and Analysis: New Development for Psychology and Education .  Hilldsale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992; Swanborn, Peter G. Case Study Research: What, Why and How? London : SAGE, 2010; Yin, Robert K. Case Study Research: Design and Methods . 6th edition. Los Angeles, CA, SAGE Publications, 2014; Walo, Maree, Adrian Bull, and Helen Breen. “Achieving Economic Benefits at Local Events: A Case Study of a Local Sports Event.” Festival Management and Event Tourism 4 (1996): 95-106.

Writing Tip

At Least Five Misconceptions about Case Study Research

Social science case studies are often perceived as limited in their ability to create new knowledge because they are not randomly selected and findings cannot be generalized to larger populations. Flyvbjerg examines five misunderstandings about case study research and systematically "corrects" each one. To quote, these are:

Misunderstanding 1 :  General, theoretical [context-independent] knowledge is more valuable than concrete, practical [context-dependent] knowledge. Misunderstanding 2 :  One cannot generalize on the basis of an individual case; therefore, the case study cannot contribute to scientific development. Misunderstanding 3 :  The case study is most useful for generating hypotheses; that is, in the first stage of a total research process, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building. Misunderstanding 4 :  The case study contains a bias toward verification, that is, a tendency to confirm the researcher’s preconceived notions. Misunderstanding 5 :  It is often difficult to summarize and develop general propositions and theories on the basis of specific case studies [p. 221].

While writing your paper, think introspectively about how you addressed these misconceptions because to do so can help you strengthen the validity and reliability of your research by clarifying issues of case selection, the testing and challenging of existing assumptions, the interpretation of key findings, and the summation of case outcomes. Think of a case study research paper as a complete, in-depth narrative about the specific properties and key characteristics of your subject of analysis applied to the research problem.

Flyvbjerg, Bent. “Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 12 (April 2006): 219-245.

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Social History

Social history in the early 21st century seems to be experiencing something of an identity crisis. This may seem surprising. During the second half of the 20th century it established a dominant position in research and an increasingly influential one in undergraduate teaching. Social history flourished on its eclecticism. Much more than did ‘conventional’ history writing, it assimilated both ideas and methodologies from other disciplines.

The pioneering work of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in establishing the so-called Annales school brought methods of social scientific enquiry to historical scholarship before the Second World War. These, allied to an emphasis on cultures and mentalities , especially of pre-industrial societies, became increasingly influential throughout Europe and the United States thereafter. Similarly, revisionist work on slavery and slave cultures in the US from the 1950s onwards owed much to anthropological research and, especially, to debates about basic similarities which characterised different ethnic groups, however different their political, economic and cultural situations.( 1 ) It was characteristic of both approaches that the primary fields of enquiry were social groups which lacked both wealth and power. Social history was widely considered to have a ‘bottom-up’ approach, offering a welcome and necessary corrective to a dominant ‘top-down’ historiography overwhelmingly concerned with the doings of emperors and elites.

Although much good social history had been produced in the United Kingdom somewhat earlier, it hurtled to prominence there in the 1960s. This was partly in reaction to the view that British students followed curricula which encouraged them to assume that only the activities of the great and the wealthy deserved detailed research, record and debate. The new emphasis on history from below partly reflected the oppositional zeitgeist of a turbulent decade which encouraged a much broader understanding of the past. The role of the individual played a part too. The 1960s witnessed the emergence of a number of supremely gifted historians whose writings, and in some cases whose personal charisma, inspired their pupils to strike out on new paths. To take just one example, our understanding of the impact and significance of Britain’s industrial revolution was utterly transformed by the writings of Edward Thompson , Eric Hobsbawm and Harold Perkin , all of whom wrote immensely influential monographs on the subject during the 1960s.

What made social history so compelling was not so much the pulling down of the historiographically mighty from their seats (although Thompson and Hobsbawm as leading contemporary, if idiosyncratic, Marxist thinkers certainly had much more time for ‘people’s champions’ such as Tom Paine and William Cobbett than for bastions of ‘old corruption’ such as William Pitt or Viscount Castlereagh) as the emergence of a historical discipline grounded in tough-minded structural analysis. Not for the scholars of the 1960s and 1970s that ersatz social history which offered romanticised vignettes of individuals previously ‘hidden from history’ or the idea that effective social history could be written via descriptions of ‘ordinary life’ or costume displays in glass cases. Social history was for them a vital, combative discipline much more interested in groups than in individuals per se and in the frequently antagonistic interactions which accelerated the pace of change in past societies.

Social historians made extensive, some might say promiscuous, use of social science methodologies. They posited hypotheses; they counted; they looked for trends. Above all, they investigated past societies in the mass. Beginning from the truism that mankind is a social animal, they focused on group behaviour and on the factors which conduced those groups to conflict and sometimes – their critics suggested all too rarely – to co-operate.

For a time, social history seemed to rule the historical roost. Specialist undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in social history were devised, with the so-called new ‘plateglass universities’ of the 1960s in the fore. What might be termed ‘orthodox history degrees’ underwent substantial curriculum change. Students were encouraged to understand the social context of political developments. The long, and still unhalted, retreat from the study of diplomacy and foreign policy (where such contexts usually had less purchase) began. As is normally the case in universities, these developments compelled hierarchical recognition. Harold Perkin at Lancaster became in 1969 the first of many UK academics to occupy a named chair as ‘Professor of Social History’. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC), established in 1965, funded research and allocated postgraduate awards specifically to students of social and economic history – a development which symbolised social history’s status as a true social science.

Why did the apparently unstoppable march of social history lose momentum? What explains why social history, as one historian recently put it, might be described as ‘a rather anxious pursuit’?( 2 ) The optimistic interpretation is that its ‘anxiety’ derives from the lack of any obvious new historical territories to conquer. The social historians of the previous generation believed themselves to be fighting a definitional war – and they had won it. It is no longer plausible either to research or to teach history, even history concerned with high politics , without consideration of the social dimension.

One of the most accomplished, if under-used, pieces of 18th-century British social history was written by a historian trained in the old disciplines of political history. It studied the English aristocracy, explaining why an increasingly confident and wealthy bourgeoisie rarely challenged continued social domination by a landed elite. The explanation lies in understanding the wider social context, which is best done as the author modestly claimed, by practising ‘a little structural analysis’. He used the techniques of social history to explain that the British aristocracy was never a closed caste and why its relative openness had such profoundly dynamic consequences as Britain established itself as the most economically developed nation on earth.( 3 ) For those who believed social history to be a coherent and integrative discipline, it was tempting to reflect ‘We are all social historians now’.

In one sense, such a statement was a truism but the complacency it implies was misplaced. Few historians are comfortable painting on the illimitable canvass of an ‘integrative discipline’. It is also the natural propensity of most research specialists to want to know more and more about less and less. The logical consequence is Balkanisation. In the United Kingdom, furthermore, this was enhanced from the late 1980s by a grotesquely wasteful and misbegotten Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). This encouraged too many scholars to play safe and too many of their ‘academic managers’ to play games aimed at massaging and manipulating redundant league tables to their own institution’s advantage. The end product too often was narrow, unimaginative and wearisomely repetitive ‘research outputs’.

For some scholars, the term ‘social history’ has long seemed unhelpfully broad. Britain has no shortage of specialist societies and groups dedicated to the study of specific aspects of social history. From a very long list, The British Agricultural History Society , founded in 1952, aims to promote the study of agricultural history and the history of the rural economy and society. The Society for the Study of Labour History was founded in 1960 and has focused on working men and women, particularly through the institutions they created and used. Some groups advocated an interdisciplinary approach to social history. The Society for the Social History of Medicine , for example, founded in 1970, encourages membership from those ‘interested in a variety of disciplines, including history, public health, demography, anthropology, sociology, social administration and health economics’. Interdisciplinary perspectives have become increasingly prominent in historians’ work during the last 30 years.

It is interesting to note that the Social History Society of the UK, founded ‘to encourage the study of the history of society and cultures’ did not appear until 1976, well after the foundation of many of the relevant specialist learned societies. Recognising the increasing influence of social history, its aim was to accommodate, if not to integrate, these more specialist branches. Its reference to ‘history of … cultures’, anticipated the ‘take-off’ of cultural history from the 1980s onwards.   

No one could possibly describe the expansion of women’s history from the 1970s as ‘narrowing’ or deny the impact it had on the discipline of history as a whole. Recent historiography has sought to emphasise the diversity of women’s experience and to relate it to variables such as religion, wealth and cultural context. Whether the recent development of studies of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ as ‘totalising’ social constructs will be fruitful it is still too early to say. The likelihood is that excessive concentration on ‘gender’ will encounter the same analytical problems as did concentration on ‘class’.

Has the increasing influence of cultural history sidelined social history? There are two reasons for thinking so. First, the Marxist influence on social history was substantial and long-lasting, yet by the 1980s it seemed increasingly anachronistic. For some, it consigned social history to the study of inflexible structures and placed too heavy an emphasis on conflict models of society. Second, cultural interpretations of historical experience seemed liberating, offering more potential for exciting new avenues to be explored. Cultural history, it rapidly became clear, was much more than the history of culture, be it ‘popular’ or ‘elite’. It was concerned with the search for meanings, and particularly with understanding how people in the past made sense of their world. The emphasis was less on ‘society’, and particularly not society as a set of structures; it was on individuals, attitudes and beliefs. Cultural historians were interested in group activity but of a less formal kind – not so much in trade unions or political societies but in carnivals, celebrations, rituals and festivals.

Central to this development was the application of aspects of literary theory to historical study . Cultural historians increasingly saw their sources as ‘texts’ which, subjected to ‘discourse analysis’, provided cultural evidence of how people perceived themselves as operating within a public sphere. Literary theory aligned with insights derived from anthropology seemed to offer rich dividends not only in a deeper understanding of the lives of the non-literate (whose voices had all too often been dimly and distortedly heard through the official records of those who judged them or ordered them about) but also of issues relating to identities, both personal and local, and the importance of collective memory.

One might comment that the work of the cultural historian could be easily assimilated within the ‘totalising vision’ of social history. The Social History Society established a new journal, Cultural and Social History , in 2004. This attempted just such an assimilation while also seeking ‘to move the discipline beyond the limits of both social and cultural history as traditionally approached by emphasizing the ways in which the “social” and the “cultural” are mutually informing … approaching society and culture as inextricably linked enables a fuller understanding of both’.

Inextricably linked the two approaches may be, but it is difficult to deny that the main impetus in the last two decades has been provided by cultural history. Social history, is still widely taught and has undoubtedly transformed the agenda of political historians over the past half century. However, it is also widely considered – not least by the new generation of postgraduate students applying for funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council – both less fashionable and less ‘cutting edge’ than is cultural history. Should we then conclude, incidentally misappropriating Dean Acheson, that social history has lost an academic empire and has not yet found a role? The picture is surely less bleak than this. Social history is necessarily concerned with an understanding and elucidation of structures: how folk engaged with one another, collaboratively, collectively, often in conflict – and at all levels from the family unit to national and even international identities. It is now abundantly clear that economic factors are only one aspect of this engagement, and often far from the most important ones. From an early 21st-century perspective, and making every allowance for its influence on the new literary theory, Marxism appears as busted an academic flush as it has long been a political one. Although Marxist historiography accommodated social, economic and political dimensions and recognised the need to explain how social relations develop, excessive emphasis both on economic factors and on class struggle precludes a rounded understanding of the totality of social relationships. Many historians consider much Marxist writing unhelpfully determinist.

Economic conflict will remain part of the social historian’s armoury in explaining the development and, not infrequently, the clash of institutions and structures but it offers only a fallible mechanism for explaining how people, in all their diversity of experiences, live and organise themselves. How quaint now seem those reductively hoary debates of the 1960s and 1970s about the impact of the industrial revolution on living standards or when ‘the working class’ was ‘made’. Work in the last 30 years on the history of women, on family life, on the uses of memory and on multiple identities has immeasurably enriched our experience of what is often, if inelegantly, referred to as ‘the social’. We now ask, almost as a reflex, how helpful a catch-all phrase such as ‘living standards’ is. Few historians retain much use for ‘the working class’ as an organising concept, although they will disagree as fiercely as ever on why it is deficient.

In the last 40 years or so, myriad new perspectives on, and approaches to, studying the past have been jostling for space, creating as their ideas collide huge but fissile sources of historical energy. It is time to stand back and re-appraise the impact of these changes. The task for the next generation is to harness that energy to create a new, clearer and broader historical narrative which incorporates the best of the new. If it ditches in the process the exclusivist jargon, ugly terminology and generally lazy writing which has characterised the work of too many historians influenced by post-structuralism and the so-called ‘ linguistic turn ’, so much the better. A re-energised social history, drawing on its integrative legacy while remaining open to new perspectives, is particularly well situated to take advantage of the opportunity.

Suggested further reading:

Literature in this area is vast. The brief suggestions here are intended to lead readers to more extensive bibliographies. The sharpest insights into the historical profession, its pitfalls and opportunities, is probably now Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London, 2000). On social history specifically, the best detailed starting point is now probably Miles Fairburn, Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods (London, 1999). What is History Today? , ed. David Cannadine(London, 2003) offers a lively and various collection of essays. A robust defence of the profession against the wilder attacks of postmodernism is presented by Richard Evans, In Defence of History (2nd edn., London, 2001). His critics doubtless wish that he had entitled it ‘Telling lies about postmodernism’! On oral history , an important technique which has influenced much writing on social history but which is not discussed here, see Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (3rd edn., Oxford, 2001).

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Eric J. Evans is the Emeritus Professor of Modern History, Lancaster University

The Institute of Historical Research © 2008

Social History

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Social History

“it is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.” – sir william osler.

It is vital to understand the patients with whom we partner. Each lives in a greater social and community context outside of healthcare and their “life story” – the social history – is a critical part of their care. It allows us both to build rapport and to understand the challenges our patients face and the strengths they bring to their experience of illness.

The social history can cover many different areas, and in primary care, it’s often built over a series of visits rather than in a single interview. Like most aspects of the history, it should be tailored to the needs and issues of your individual patient, first focusing on the elements most important to their care. The “Social E” approach to the social history also encourages clinicians to detect and consider biological, chemical, physical, and psychological factors in the environment as well as other environmental change that could be affecting their patient’s health. It is an important part of the planetary health history.

Eliciting the Social History

Start with a transition to orient your patient to the change in focus, like “Now I’d like to ask you some questions about your life,” followed by an open-ended question. At their first visit with a patient, most primary care physicians will try to learn about each of the topics below. Some information about social context and stressors may already have been shared in the HPI. The clinician will explore other areas either by asking questions or by reviewing a form that the patient has completed before the visit.

Social and Environmental Factors & Health

As you’ve already learned, health depends on much more than healthcare. Clinical care is clearly important – our diagnostic acumen, our efficacy in managing chronic conditions, and our procedural skills help patients every day. However, clinical care plays a smaller role in health outcomes than social and economic factors – experts have estimated that healthcare is responsible for only 20% of health outcomes.

from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation “County Health Rankings and Roadmaps” LINK

The social history helps us to understand the strengths and supports that could be incorporated into our patient’s care plan and to identify barriers to health that our interprofessional healthcare team and community partners could help to address. For example, a patient facing financial barriers to care could be referred to a hospital financial counselor for help identifying low-cost insurance or free care.

Understanding the strong influence of structural factors can also help us maintain empathy for our individual patients and lead us to advocate for and support the structural changes that could improve the overall health of our society. Health behaviors, social and economic factors, and the physical environment are all strongly influenced by inequities in the distribution of money, power and resources at the global, national, and local level. These inequities and the health disparities they cause are rooted in structural and systemic biases and racism across multiple sectors of our society.

As you learn about differences in health outcomes for racial and other groups, consider the intersecting social and economic inequities that could drive or exacerbate the different health outcomes. These inequities are almost always the underlying cause of health disparities. The image below is from the Kaiser Family Foundation – more information is available at kff.org

In the context of the patient interview, clinicians often ask about the factors that directly impact our medical decision-making and those that our healthcare team may be able to help with.

Social context & relationships

A patient’s social support system can have a profound impact on their health, and is often the starting point of the social history. “ Who do you live with? Who do you turn to for support? What do you enjoy doing?” As a society, we rely on family and friends to provide a great deal of care. When a patient is admitted to the hospital, their social support network determines when they can be safely discharged from the hospital and where they will go. At home, friends and family often help with medications, therapy, transportation and self care.

But even before an illness, social connectedness clearly affects health. Social isolation and loneliness are associated with higher mortality, on the same order as substance use disorder or lack of access to healthcare. These effects on wellness have been shown to be so significant that community organizations and government programs are now starting to address loneliness and isolation, especially in elders. A hospital or clinic social worker can often connect people with these resources.

Housing & environment

A safe, well maintained and affordable home in a supportive community, with access to transportation, jobs, healthy food and medical care, promotes a healthy life. But due to economic and societal inequities, many of our patients don’t live in these conditions.

Homelessness has a particularly large impact on health, so it’s critical that we know if our patients lack stable housing. Those experiencing homelessness have disproportionately high rates of chronic illnesses, and without a home and a safe place to store medications, these can be very difficult to treat. Living on the streets or in a shelter also exposes people to infectious diseases, violence, malnutrition and harsh weather.

Exposure to air, water, and soil pollution also varies by neighborhood. In the US, pollution related illness is most common in minorities and in marginalized groups because sources of pollution have long been placed in these communities. Children are at particularly high risk, and even low level exposures early in life can lead to life long problems.

The process of assessing environmental health risk has a number of phases, starting with hazard identification (i.e.: “What is the exposure”, and then proceeding to exposure assessment (e: How much of the hazard is the patient exposed to?) and then risk assessment based on the hazard and the exposure (e: How Much health risk does the patient have from this hazard?).

Therefore, in the basic social history, it is appropriate to focus on hazard identification through a short number of screening questions about health hazards in the patient’s environment. If any hazards are identified, more detailed questions can be asked about how much exposure, in order to arrive at an assessment of risk from a particular hazard .

Access to healthcare

People with a usual source of care have better health outcomes and than those who do not. Research has shown that an established relationship with a primary care provider is associated with receiving more appropriate medical care and lower all-cause mortality.

Access to primary care varies by location. Rural communities often lack access due to physician work force shortages and absence of healthcare facilities. Age-adjusted death rates for the top 5 causes of the death are higher in rural areas than in urban areas, and half of rural counties lack obstetrics services.

Access to care is also highly dependent on health insurance. The ‘safety net’ of public hospitals, community health centers, and emergency departments can’t close the access gap for the uninsured. With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the number of uninsured Americans fell from 44 million to 27.9 million in 2019, but lack of insurance is still a major barrier and the number of uninsured is growing again. Even for those who have insurance, the cost of health care can be a barrier, especially for families with low incomes or a pre-existing health condition. This graph is from the Kaiser Family Foundation, Key facts about the uninsured

Education and health are clearly and strongly linked. People with a bachelors degree can expect to live about 9 years longer than those without a high school diploma, and those with more years of schooling are likely to have better health outcomes and to have healthier children. Many studies have shown that education improves health knowledge and health literacy, and understanding our patients’ educational attainment can help us adjust our approach to health and disease management. You’ll learn more this spring. The diagram below is from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Issue Brief: Education & Health

You will see other topics addressed with selected groups of patients – you will come back to each of these over the course of your curriculum.

Social History at an Initial Visit: Example

Our patient with a severe headache has already shared quite a bit of her social history as part of the HPI. We’ve already learned that she’s married to her wife Sonya and has a high stress job running her own business. She had a very stressful situation at work yesterday.

In this clip, the provider refers back to some of what she’s already heard and asks some additional questions about relationships, work and hobbies, access to care and financial concerns. Additional questions about intimate partner violence and home safety are part of the pre-visit questionnaire, which the physician reviewed before the encounter.

Resources & references

Misdiagnosis, Mistreatment, and Harm — When Medical Care Ignores Social Forces. New England Journal of Medicine, March 19, 2020.

Deconstructing Biases and Racism in Medicine. Textbook of Physical Diagnosis: History and Exam. (UW NetID/login required)

Racism’s Hidden Toll , New York Times, 8/11/2020

A systematic review of reasons for and against asking patients about their socioeconomic contexts Moscrop, A., Ziebland, S., Roberts, N. et al. Int J Equity Health 18, 112 (2019).

Differences in Life Expectancy Due to Race and Educational Differences Are Widening and Many May Not Catch Up (2012). An article from the “Health Affairs” Disparities series

Neigh borhoods and Health . Summary of issues and evidence from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Education and Health from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Excellent summary of evidence.

Social Factors Chapter 6 from “US Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health.” A consensus study report from the United States National Academy of Medicine. Available online free.

The Foundations of Clinical Medicine Copyright © by Karen McDonough. All Rights Reserved.

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How to Use Social History in Genealogy

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One unusual piece of advice: If your genealogy research is stuck or you’ve “lost” your ancestor, stop actually looking for that particular ancestor. Instead, turn your attention to the events happening around them and the social issues that could have been influencing their life and the decisions they made. Consider questions like:

• Why did your ancestors make the decisions they did?
• Why did they migrate to another state?
• Why did those great-great-grandparents cross the state or county border to get married?
• Why did that great-grandfather choose to work in that occupation?
• What did a Monday morning in May of 1890 look like for your ancestor?

And why should you care about the answers to these questions? Quite simply, genealogy researchers need to understand the influences on their ancestors’ lives and decision-making to find those brick-wall ancestors. And, in general, understanding the answers to these and other questions about social history gives us better insight into the lives our ancestors lived.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the various aspects of “social history,” and what records you can use to learn about them.

What is Social History?

The dictionary definition indicates “social” history considers the social, economic and cultural factors related to a group of people. And in a similar way, for the genealogist, social history refers to the trends, events and forces (local, regional and national) that impacted the lives of our ancestors in big and small ways. Social history also encompasses the lives of ordinary people: how they lived, how they worked and how they played.

When we’re better able to understand what influenced an ancestor’s decision, we’re better able to find records. In a sense, the researcher needs to “get inside their ancestor’s head,” and think as they thought.

For example, have you ever considered the terrain of the land where your ancestor lived, and how it might have impacted their lives? Researching ancestors in Surry County, N.C., was a challenge for me. Finding marriage records in the United States can be difficult enough, but this missing record was a specific genealogical brick wall that loomed large. The marriage record simply wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

Needing advice and a new perspective, I reached out to a local researcher . She asked me what I thought was a strange question: What time of year were the couples marrying?”

I didn’t follow her line of thinking. What could time of year possibly have to do with marriage records? But the researcher shared an important insight: “Lisa, you have to remember the terrain and the land up here.”

Surry County is in the foothills of North Carolina, on the border with Virginia. If a couple married in the summer, they could easily get to the Surry County courthouse. But if they married in the winter or during the spring when the river ran high, they would’ve gone to the courthouse they could safely get to, regardless if that courthouse was in a neighboring county or state (in this case, Virginia).

The land and weather very much dictated when and where life events occurred and were recorded for these rural ancestors. As a “flatlander” researcher, I had failed to recognize the influence foothills terrain could have on the logistics of an ancestor’s marriage place. And sure enough, the marriage was recorded in a Virginia courthouse.

Common Factors in Social History

Now that you want to take social history into account as you research, what types of historical information should you consider? Here are just six key factors to research.

1. Customs for Celebrating Life Events

How did your ancestors celebrate a marriage or a baptism? Did they identify godparents for their children? The customs surrounding such major life events were often shaped by faith, cultural heritage and socioeconomic status—all important data points for genealogists.

Holidays, too, can contain clues to faith tradition and culture. Which holidays did they observe? Were certain foods eaten on particular holidays? Some customs trace back to specific regions within an ancestral home country, so study your ancestor’s traditions. Follow up with records and resources such as newspapers that will help you better understand which religious or ethnic groups celebrated with those traditions, and why.

Chronic illnesses, epidemics and pandemics are not unique to our current times. Past generations suffered these events, too, and genealogy researchers can see the evidence reflected in their ancestors’ lives.

Public health crises changed societies, much as we’ve seen recently through the COVID-19 pandemic. Genealogy researchers need to understand the effect these large-scale diseases had on their ancestors.

If your ancestors lived during the time of an epidemic (such as the 1918 “Spanish flu” epidemic ), take time to learn about the effects that illness had on communities, societies and the residents of those areas.

For example, as death tolls rose (sometimes with whole families dying out), so did the number of widows and orphans —a morbid, but useful opportunity to find records. If your ancestor was suddenly widowed, seek out estate records and guardianship records. And if children were placed in an orphanage or were otherwise separated from their families, that might explain their absence (either temporarily or permanently) from family records. Alternatively, you may find a new, unexpected child living with your known family because of this reshuffling.

Health crises also sometimes lead to migrations . Perhaps your family moved to escape the worst of a health crisis, or to be closer to better healthcare options. In the mid-1800s, for example, people suffering from tuberculosis may have moved to the western United States, where they could find a climate better suited to their condition.

3. The Economy

Economics have long impacted where people lived, what they bought and sold, and how they made a living. But widespread economic downfalls—such as the Great Depression or other significant economic events—also had lasting impacts worth studying.

Perhaps a job loss because of a recession forced your ancestor to leave town and find work elsewhere. If so, research common migration routes and destinations, particularly for someone in your ancestor’s trade. And if your family required financial or housing assistance from the government, look for records of the county’s poor to see if your ancestor is listed among them.

Local and county histories often detail an economic crisis in a particular area. Refer to the community’s written histories to learn about the impacts on the community and where residents may have migrated to for better job opportunities.

4. Wars and Politics

Without a doubt, wars disrupted our ancestors’ lives—particularly for those living in Central and Eastern Europe during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Consider how a war or the political environment may have impacted your ancestor’s life. Did they join the military? What type of economic hardship did the war cause your ancestor’s family?

Perhaps your family had to relocate for safety due to changing fortunes during the course of the war: a new regime coming to power, or an army invading. In these cases, your ancestor may have enlisted the help of a group such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society .

5. Weather and Natural Disasters

Our ancestors’ lives were often closely entwined with the weather and with nature. As we discussed earlier, a rainy spell could mean choosing a different county courthouse to marry in. Or a hurricane could mean a fisherman lost his livelihood and moved in with family in a neighboring state to find other work, while a drought could mean an out-of-work farmer moved his family to a city.

Read local histories, and study the community and time period of your ancestors to determine if and how a natural disaster could have impacted their lives. GenDisasters.com offers a database of newspaper articles about fires, floods and other catastrophic events. You can even look up historical weather using tools like the US’ National Centers for Environmental Information’s Climate Data Online Search .

6. Social Causes and Movements

What was important to your ancestor? What social cause was close to their heart? Maybe she was a suffragette, or a member of a temperance society. Seek out records associated with the political causes and societies they enrolled in.

Of course, your ancestor may also have been a member of a non-political club or society. Fraternal organizations , in particular, were popular during the 20th century among both men and women. Even these organizations kept records of members and minutes of activities, so add them to your list of resources to check if you suspect your ancestor was a member.

Social History Records

Social history can be documented in a variety or records and resources, and it’s important not to overlook the clues you find in them.

The first and easiest place to look for clues is the federal census. You’re probably already familiar with these records and the many details about your ancestors they can hold . Consult these fields, in particular:

• Occupation : What your answer did for a living gives clues to his social status, as well as possible membership in professional organizations or unions.
• Wealth : Socioeconomic status is a useful factor in and of itself, but significant changes in wealth across census records can indicate changing economic fortunes like job loss.
• Race : Depending on time and place, race may have impacted many aspects of your ancestor’s life: where they could live, who they could marry, and more.

Also look before and after your ancestral family’s entry to learn about their neighbors. Did they speak the same language or have the same cultural origins as your family? Immigrant communities often lived together in groups, forming a support network, but perhaps your ancestor lived in a part of the city that was especially diverse.

In addition, look between censuses and note any changes to your family’s composition. Were there unexpected deaths or departures? Did extended family members move in or out?

The newspaper was an important source of information for our ancestors , containing everything from politics to world news to details about which church was hosting a revival that week. Perusing the newspapers your ancestors actually read gives you a unique perspective on what was important at that point in time, so look for local, regional, cultural and religious newspapers that were published during your ancestor’s time and place. The free Chronicling America is a good place to start, with a US Newspaper Directory that catalogs all known newspapers published in the United States since 1690.

Even with all that searching , you still may not find your ancestor named or referred to in the newspaper, and that’s okay. As a researcher, you’re—as your English teacher would say—reading for context, with a focus on what was happening on the local and national scale.

City Directories

City directories include addresses that put your ancestor on the map (so to speak), but that’s just the beginning of what they can tell you about your ancestor’s community. The information in each directory will vary , but you may find local histories, plus listings of organizations, clubs, churches and other faith organizations in town. Directories might also include a listing of items taxed, plus the tax rate.

And why are these additional listings useful? Because they tell you what type of business or industry was important to the community. What were the major companies in your ancestor’s town (and did your family work for them)? Were there several organizations or clubs dedicated to one particular social issue? Did one or another seem more prominent?

County & Local Histories

These are some of the best places to learn about a community and area , since they document the how, why and by whom it was settled. Where did early residents mostly migrate from? Why did they choose that spot? Was the land similar to what they were used to? Could they continue with the same type of farming or occupation in that location? Understanding why a community was settled and who settled it provides clues to finding earlier generations in a previous location. Local histories will also often report on natural disasters and economic disasters impacting the area’s residents.

Sources for local histories include Google Books and the local library. (We have a tutorial for the former here .) Additionally, search WorldCat , which chronicles holdings from libraries around the world, for local histories to obtain through interlibrary loan.

Oral Histories

If you’re wondering why your grandmother’s family moved from North Carolina to Maryland or what life was like for her working in a textile mill, what better resource than your grandmother herself? Oral history provides you with a first-hand account of exactly the social, economic and cultural conditions you want to study. The stories within a family give clues not only to an ancestor’s personality, but to the influences affecting their decisions.

Unfortunately, collecting family stories from the people involved is often overlooked until it’s too late. Because of this, many researchers miss out on the nuances of an ancestor’s personal history. If you have living relatives you still need to interview, make plans to do so today .

But even when no one is left to provide that family history, you might benefit from exploring oral history projects such as “Oral Histories of the American South” ) and “American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project.” Though probably not specific to your ancestors, these collections can be excellent resources to learn about the life stories of Americans with similar experiences.

Our ancestors’ lives were influenced by many events, external forces and societal norms. Everything from the terrain where a family lived to the social causes they championed could affect how our ancestors made decisions about where to live, love and work. These values and motivators go beyond traditional genealogy records, and can help you break down your brick walls.

But more importantly, imagining your ancestor’s daily life adds a depth to your research, drawing in other family members (especially younger generations) as you share their stories for future generations.

A version of this article appeared in the November/December 2020 issue of Family Tree Magazine .

Lisa Lisson

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The Classical Classroom

A glimpse inside Hillsdale College's network of classical schools across the country.

History and Social Studies: What’s the difference?

This week I’m reporting to you all from Livingston Classical Academy, where I’m watching the BCSI instructional team train new teachers as they prepare to begin the school year. Teachers from two young Hillsdale-affiliated schools are here, and our instructional team is giving them an introduction to the theory and practice of each of the subjects.

It’s a funny thing, being a teacher but not working in a school. It’s like being a headmaster without a school, I think. The first thing I noticed when our sessions began is that each member of the curriculum and instruction team lights up at the front of a classroom. These are people who love to teach, and who know how to do it well. They want what we all want out of our schools: consistent excellence in the pursuit of our mission.

Let me introduce you to one of them. This is Jordan Adams. A graduate of Hillsdale with a Master’s Degree from the University of Dallas, Jordan comes to the Barney Charter School initiative from Founders Classical Academy of Lewisville, one of our affiliated schools.

Jordan has taught history, government, economics, and Latin to grades 3-12 and he advises teachers in the areas of history and Latin. This morning he gave a presentation on the difference between history and social studies, and I thought I’d share some notes I took during his talk.

If you are a parent, these notes might help you evaluate your child’s history class. If you are a teacher in a classical school, they might help you plan your lessons or give you ways to describe the teaching of history to others. If you are a teacher of social studies or a teacher in a non-classical school, this might help you think about two different ways of approaching the same subject.

What’s the difference between history and social studies?

Social studies is a scientific approach to the study of history. It assumes that there is a scientific or semi-scientific explanation for human behavior, and that by studying and analyzing the behavior of human beings in the past, we can fully understand human beings and perhaps even manipulate human behavior to prevent bad things from happening in the future. Social studies tends to be focused on change or improvement, and it rests on the idea that by studying the past we can ensure a brighter future. Social studies tends to study groups of people rather than individuals, and it looks to draw generalizations and identify trends or themes over time.

History, on the other hand, treats the events of the past as a story–the story of human beings individually and in society. History is a narrative account of what happened in the past, and when it is compelling it focuses on the most important things. History is interested in particular human beings and explore the effect that important people and important events had. It notes that the past is full of things to admire and things to condemn, and that the future is not necessarily better than the past.

What is a social studies teacher like?

A social studies teacher is distant and removed, treating the people and events of the past as objects to be analyzed. The social studies teacher collects data points and speaks broadly about themes and eras. The social studies teacher hopes or expects that mastery of these data points will result in a full understanding of human beings, and that that full understanding can be used to improve the human condition. Perhaps unconsciously, the social studies teacher teaches students to be distant from the subject, too. Like the social scientist, these students must memorize, master, and analyze so that they can make use of their knowledge. Knowledge in the social studies classroom is above all a tool.

What is a history teacher like?

A history teacher is above all a storyteller, someone who is fully immersed in the time period he or she is teaching and who sometimes speaks about the people at that time as if he knows them. A history teacher delights in thinking about history and studies it for its own sake. His knowledge is not a tool, but a source of great delight for him and for others. Sure, it has its uses, but that’s not why he learned history in the first place. Above all, he knows because he loves to learn.

A great history lesson is a little bit like a performance. There is a drama to it–comedy and tragedy. There is sorrow at the death of a great hero, and anger at the ascent of a villain. The teacher delivers the lesson and has the class’s full attention, but the teacher himself is not the students’ focus. He is the vehicle through which they watch the stories of the past unfold. Sometimes the students may help act out the performance, but because there is a lot to cover and because the teacher is the one who knows, he never hands over control the class to the students. He is always in charge, moving quickly and excitedly, imparting through his speech and action his love of history and his delight as the students learn to love it too.

There are many good things that come from the study of history, but above all, the history teacher studies history because it is delightful. The history teacher is neither distant nor analytical. He is a great master of information, full of names and dates, always creating timelines and scrawling maps on the board, but the history teacher never lets the memorization of dates or places become the primary goal of class. Knowing the facts is important because it leads the students to deeper understanding. They don’t memorize every fact and date, just the ones that matter most. These they know by heart, and they can recall them at a moment’s notice.

The history teacher immerses the class in primary texts, because by reading the words of those who came before students learn to put ourselves in their place. These texts are not easy to read at first, but with a little practice the language becomes familiar and shows us what the people who wrote it are like. Reading the words of those who came before us reminds us that they were human beings too, that they had lives like ours, and that they experienced the human condition as we do. Suddenly these figures from the past begin to take shape; they don’t seem so different from us even when they lived hundreds of years before. This makes us wonder whether things are so different now than they used to be. If they are different, how are they different? What is the same?

The history teacher asks questions of the students, perhaps dozens or more than a hundred per class, to help the students think for themselves. He doesn’t give the answer, but leads students to wonder and discover things on their own. Because there are so many questions and because every student is called upon to speak at some point in the class, students are not just attentive but fascinated, and eager for their opportunity to say what they have learned. Speaking up in class becomes commonplace, and their attention turns from whether they have spoken that day to what they said and how they said it.

Sitting through a great history lesson is exciting. It is suspenseful. There is a lot of energy in the room. The students are thrilled, and their minds are racing, but they are listening in rapt attention for the whole period. At the end of the story they are dying to know what happens next, or they are left with some big question to ponder on their own.

Now, becoming an excellent teacher of history is the work of a lifetime. Almost none of us are able to teach an excellent history lesson every time in the first years of teaching. But, improving as a teacher is delightful work, and important work, too. We at Hillsdale College are here to help.

This is the first of a series of posts on the teaching of history. Coming soon: the 7 reasons we study history, with examples tied to Hillsdale College’s American classical curriculum for K-12 students.

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StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-.

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Case study: 33-year-old female presents with chronic sob and cough.

Sandeep Sharma ; Muhammad F. Hashmi ; Deepa Rawat .

Affiliations

Last Update: February 20, 2023 .

• Case Presentation

History of Present Illness:  A 33-year-old white female presents after admission to the general medical/surgical hospital ward with a chief complaint of shortness of breath on exertion. She reports that she was seen for similar symptoms previously at her primary care physician’s office six months ago. At that time, she was diagnosed with acute bronchitis and treated with bronchodilators, empiric antibiotics, and a short course oral steroid taper. This management did not improve her symptoms, and she has gradually worsened over six months. She reports a 20-pound (9 kg) intentional weight loss over the past year. She denies camping, spelunking, or hunting activities. She denies any sick contacts. A brief review of systems is negative for fever, night sweats, palpitations, chest pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, abdominal pain, neural sensation changes, muscular changes, and increased bruising or bleeding. She admits a cough, shortness of breath, and shortness of breath on exertion.

Social History: Her tobacco use is 33 pack-years; however, she quit smoking shortly prior to the onset of symptoms, six months ago. She denies alcohol and illicit drug use. She is in a married, monogamous relationship and has three children aged 15 months to 5 years. She is employed in a cookie bakery. She has two pet doves. She traveled to Mexico for a one-week vacation one year ago.

Allergies:  No known medicine, food, or environmental allergies.

Past Medical History: Hypertension

Past Surgical History: Cholecystectomy

Medications: Lisinopril 10 mg by mouth every day

Physical Exam:

Vitals: Temperature, 97.8 F; heart rate 88; respiratory rate, 22; blood pressure 130/86; body mass index, 28

General: She is well appearing but anxious, a pleasant female lying on a hospital stretcher. She is conversing freely, with respiratory distress causing her to stop mid-sentence.

Respiratory: She has diffuse rales and mild wheezing; tachypneic.

Cardiovascular: She has a regular rate and rhythm with no murmurs, rubs, or gallops.

Gastrointestinal: Bowel sounds X4. No bruits or pulsatile mass.

• Initial Evaluation

Laboratory Studies:  Initial work-up from the emergency department revealed pancytopenia with a platelet count of 74,000 per mm3; hemoglobin, 8.3 g per and mild transaminase elevation, AST 90 and ALT 112. Blood cultures were drawn and currently negative for bacterial growth or Gram staining.

Chest X-ray

Impression:  Mild interstitial pneumonitis

• Differential Diagnosis
• Aspiration pneumonitis and pneumonia
• Bacterial pneumonia
• Immunodeficiency state and Pneumocystis jiroveci pneumonia
• Carcinoid lung tumors
• Tuberculosis
• Viral pneumonia
• Chlamydial pneumonia
• Coccidioidomycosis and valley fever
• Recurrent Legionella pneumonia
• Mediastinal cysts
• Mediastinal lymphoma
• Recurrent mycoplasma infection
• Pancoast syndrome
• Pneumococcal infection
• Sarcoidosis
• Small cell lung cancer
• Aspergillosis
• Blastomycosis
• Histoplasmosis
• Actinomycosis
• Confirmatory Evaluation

CT of the chest was performed to further the pulmonary diagnosis; it showed a diffuse centrilobular micronodular pattern without focal consolidation.

On finding pulmonary consolidation on the CT of the chest, a pulmonary consultation was obtained. Further history was taken, which revealed that she has two pet doves. As this was her third day of broad-spectrum antibiotics for a bacterial infection and she was not getting better, it was decided to perform diagnostic bronchoscopy of the lungs with bronchoalveolar lavage to look for any atypical or rare infections and to rule out malignancy (Image 1).

Bronchoalveolar lavage returned with a fluid that was cloudy and muddy in appearance. There was no bleeding. Cytology showed Histoplasma capsulatum .

Based on the bronchoscopic findings, a diagnosis of acute pulmonary histoplasmosis in an immunocompetent patient was made.

Pulmonary histoplasmosis in asymptomatic patients is self-resolving and requires no treatment. However, once symptoms develop, such as in our above patient, a decision to treat needs to be made. In mild, tolerable cases, no treatment other than close monitoring is necessary. However, once symptoms progress to moderate or severe, or if they are prolonged for greater than four weeks, treatment with itraconazole is indicated. The anticipated duration is 6 to 12 weeks total. The response should be monitored with a chest x-ray. Furthermore, observation for recurrence is necessary for several years following the diagnosis. If the illness is determined to be severe or does not respond to itraconazole, amphotericin B should be initiated for a minimum of 2 weeks, but up to 1 year. Cotreatment with methylprednisolone is indicated to improve pulmonary compliance and reduce inflammation, thus improving work of respiration. [1] [2] [3]

Histoplasmosis, also known as Darling disease, Ohio valley disease, reticuloendotheliosis, caver's disease, and spelunker's lung, is a disease caused by the dimorphic fungi  Histoplasma capsulatum native to the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi River valleys of the United States. The two phases of Histoplasma are the mycelial phase and the yeast phase.

Etiology/Pathophysiology 

Histoplasmosis is caused by inhaling the microconidia of  Histoplasma  spp. fungus into the lungs. The mycelial phase is present at ambient temperature in the environment, and upon exposure to 37 C, such as in a host’s lungs, it changes into budding yeast cells. This transition is an important determinant in the establishment of infection. Inhalation from soil is a major route of transmission leading to infection. Human-to-human transmission has not been reported. Infected individuals may harbor many yeast-forming colonies chronically, which remain viable for years after initial inoculation. The finding that individuals who have moved or traveled from endemic to non-endemic areas may exhibit a reactivated infection after many months to years supports this long-term viability. However, the precise mechanism of reactivation in chronic carriers remains unknown.

Infection ranges from an asymptomatic illness to a life-threatening disease, depending on the host’s immunological status, fungal inoculum size, and other factors. Histoplasma  spp. have grown particularly well in organic matter enriched with bird or bat excrement, leading to the association that spelunking in bat-feces-rich caves increases the risk of infection. Likewise, ownership of pet birds increases the rate of inoculation. In our case, the patient did travel outside of Nebraska within the last year and owned two birds; these are her primary increased risk factors. [4]

Non-immunocompromised patients present with a self-limited respiratory infection. However, the infection in immunocompromised hosts disseminated histoplasmosis progresses very aggressively. Within a few days, histoplasmosis can reach a fatality rate of 100% if not treated aggressively and appropriately. Pulmonary histoplasmosis may progress to a systemic infection. Like its pulmonary counterpart, the disseminated infection is related to exposure to soil containing infectious yeast. The disseminated disease progresses more slowly in immunocompetent hosts compared to immunocompromised hosts. However, if the infection is not treated, fatality rates are similar. The pathophysiology for disseminated disease is that once inhaled, Histoplasma yeast are ingested by macrophages. The macrophages travel into the lymphatic system where the disease, if not contained, spreads to different organs in a linear fashion following the lymphatic system and ultimately into the systemic circulation. Once this occurs, a full spectrum of disease is possible. Inside the macrophage, this fungus is contained in a phagosome. It requires thiamine for continued development and growth and will consume systemic thiamine. In immunocompetent hosts, strong cellular immunity, including macrophages, epithelial, and lymphocytes, surround the yeast buds to keep infection localized. Eventually, it will become calcified as granulomatous tissue. In immunocompromised hosts, the organisms disseminate to the reticuloendothelial system, leading to progressive disseminated histoplasmosis. [5] [6]

Symptoms of infection typically begin to show within three to17 days. Immunocompetent individuals often have clinically silent manifestations with no apparent ill effects. The acute phase of infection presents as nonspecific respiratory symptoms, including cough and flu. A chest x-ray is read as normal in 40% to 70% of cases. Chronic infection can resemble tuberculosis with granulomatous changes or cavitation. The disseminated illness can lead to hepatosplenomegaly, adrenal enlargement, and lymphadenopathy. The infected sites usually calcify as they heal. Histoplasmosis is one of the most common causes of mediastinitis. Presentation of the disease may vary as any other organ in the body may be affected by the disseminated infection. [7]

The clinical presentation of the disease has a wide-spectrum presentation which makes diagnosis difficult. The mild pulmonary illness may appear as a flu-like illness. The severe form includes chronic pulmonary manifestation, which may occur in the presence of underlying lung disease. The disseminated form is characterized by the spread of the organism to extrapulmonary sites with proportional findings on imaging or laboratory studies. The Gold standard for establishing the diagnosis of histoplasmosis is through culturing the organism. However, diagnosis can be established by histological analysis of samples containing the organism taken from infected organs. It can be diagnosed by antigen detection in blood or urine, PCR, or enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The diagnosis also can be made by testing for antibodies again the fungus. [8]

Pulmonary histoplasmosis in asymptomatic patients is self-resolving and requires no treatment. However, once symptoms develop, such as in our above patient, a decision to treat needs to be made. In mild, tolerable cases, no treatment other than close monitoring is necessary. However, once symptoms progress to moderate or severe or if they are prolonged for greater than four weeks, treatment with itraconazole is indicated. The anticipated duration is 6 to 12 weeks. The patient's response should be monitored with a chest x-ray. Furthermore, observation for recurrence is necessary for several years following the diagnosis. If the illness is determined to be severe or does not respond to itraconazole, amphotericin B should be initiated for a minimum of 2 weeks, but up to 1 year. Cotreatment with methylprednisolone is indicated to improve pulmonary compliance and reduce inflammation, thus improving the work of respiration.

The disseminated disease requires similar systemic antifungal therapy to pulmonary infection. Additionally, procedural intervention may be necessary, depending on the site of dissemination, to include thoracentesis, pericardiocentesis, or abdominocentesis. Ocular involvement requires steroid treatment additions and necessitates ophthalmology consultation. In pericarditis patients, antifungals are contraindicated because the subsequent inflammatory reaction from therapy would worsen pericarditis.

Patients may necessitate intensive care unit placement dependent on their respiratory status, as they may pose a risk for rapid decompensation. Should this occur, respiratory support is necessary, including non-invasive BiPAP or invasive mechanical intubation. Surgical interventions are rarely warranted; however, bronchoscopy is useful as both a diagnostic measure to collect sputum samples from the lung and therapeutic to clear excess secretions from the alveoli. Patients are at risk for developing a coexistent bacterial infection, and appropriate antibiotics should be considered after 2 to 4 months of known infection if symptoms are still present. [9]

Prognosis 

If not treated appropriately and in a timely fashion, the disease can be fatal, and complications will arise, such as recurrent pneumonia leading to respiratory failure, superior vena cava syndrome, fibrosing mediastinitis, pulmonary vessel obstruction leading to pulmonary hypertension and right-sided heart failure, and progressive fibrosis of lymph nodes. Acute pulmonary histoplasmosis usually has a good outcome on symptomatic therapy alone, with 90% of patients being asymptomatic. Disseminated histoplasmosis, if untreated, results in death within 2 to 24 months. Overall, there is a relapse rate of 50% in acute disseminated histoplasmosis. In chronic treatment, however, this relapse rate decreases to 10% to 20%. Death is imminent without treatment.

• Pearls of Wisdom

While illnesses such as pneumonia are more prevalent, it is important to keep in mind that more rare diseases are always possible. Keeping in mind that every infiltrates on a chest X-ray or chest CT is not guaranteed to be simple pneumonia. Key information to remember is that if the patient is not improving under optimal therapy for a condition, the working diagnosis is either wrong or the treatment modality chosen by the physician is wrong and should be adjusted. When this occurs, it is essential to collect a more detailed history and refer the patient for appropriate consultation with a pulmonologist or infectious disease specialist. Doing so, in this case, yielded workup with bronchoalveolar lavage and microscopic evaluation. Microscopy is invaluable for definitively diagnosing a pulmonary consolidation as exemplified here where the results showed small, budding, intracellular yeast in tissue sized 2 to 5 microns that were readily apparent on hematoxylin and eosin staining and minimal, normal flora bacterial growth. 

• Enhancing Healthcare Team Outcomes

This case demonstrates how all interprofessional healthcare team members need to be involved in arriving at a correct diagnosis. Clinicians, specialists, nurses, pharmacists, laboratory technicians all bear responsibility for carrying out the duties pertaining to their particular discipline and sharing any findings with all team members. An incorrect diagnosis will almost inevitably lead to incorrect treatment, so coordinated activity, open communication, and empowerment to voice concerns are all part of the dynamic that needs to drive such cases so patients will attain the best possible outcomes.

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Histoplasma Contributed by Sandeep Sharma, MD

Disclosure: Sandeep Sharma declares no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies.

Disclosure: Muhammad Hashmi declares no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies.

Disclosure: Deepa Rawat declares no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies.

This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ), which permits others to distribute the work, provided that the article is not altered or used commercially. You are not required to obtain permission to distribute this article, provided that you credit the author and journal.

• Cite this Page Sharma S, Hashmi MF, Rawat D. Case Study: 33-Year-Old Female Presents with Chronic SOB and Cough. [Updated 2023 Feb 20]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-.

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C4 community conversations con cake.

Event Date Wed, May 8, 2024 @ 5:00pm - 7:00pm

Community conversations con cake.

The UC Irvine History Project is excited to invite you to join our C4! year-long pilot program. Our goal is to bring together , in person, a diverse group of ten local high school humanities educators and create a unique learning community. 

This program is a response to discussions with local teachers who have expressed their desire to build a supportive community where they can practice difficult dialogues, engage in active listening, and share stories. The goal is to develop pedagogical acumen that centers on how to have fact-based conversations while learning critically about the broader theme of human rights.

The program will consist of five meetings, beginning on May 8th, 2024, and culminating at the end of the 2024-2025 academic year. 

As part of the program, we will provide opportunities and structures for storytelling, asking questions, listening for understanding, and reflection. These pedagogical practices will support teachers to implement the Common Core State Standards for Speaking and Listening, while at the same time creating a deep understanding of our shared history and goals for the advancement of human rights. The program will offer an approach to creating spaces for dialogue and activism around the ways human rights have, and have yet, to be realized in our local community and across the globe. The intention is that participants can incorporate some of these practices into their classrooms. 

And of course, there will be cake! 

Click here to apply by April 30!

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Bill on history, social studies class requirements clears iowa legislature.

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Iowa House lawmakers sent a bill to Gov. Kim Reynolds Wednesday that would add requirements for instruction in social studies classes related to the history of the U.S. and Western civilization.

House File 2545 would require the Iowa Department of Education director to conduct a review and make recommendations on the state’s curriculum and content standards. The Senate amended and passed the legislation Tuesday evening to include components of a previous House proposal on social studies curriculum requirements.

The bill would direct the Iowa Board of Education to review and make changes to the state’s social studies core curriculum standards by Dec. 31, 2025. The standards would require that Iowa students in grades 1 through 12 receive instruction on important events and influential people in the history of western civilization, the U.S. and the state of Iowa. Classes would also be required to cover the structure and role of U.S. and state government, how it differs from other forms of government and “the crimes against humanity that have occurred under communist regimes since 1917.”

Rep. Skyler Wheeler, R-Hull, said the Senate amendment was a “majorly scaled down version” of what the House passed previously. He said he would prefer the bill be “a lot more prescriptive than it is right now,” saying that many students are not receiving instruction on subjects from the Korean War to the more recent “War on Terror.”

He also said this lack of instruction on American history and the Founding Fathers is what has led to recent movements like calls to tear down statutes of people like Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, primary author of the Declaration of Independence, spoke and wrote in opposition to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade throughout his life, while being a slaveowner himself.

“The problem in this country is we have people that want to tear down statues of our founding fathers, which tells me that they’re not getting, I would say, the full view of history,” Wheeler said. “They’re being taught the history, but there is some sort of a specific push being made, to tear down a statue of Thomas Jefferson. If you knew the whole history of Thomas Jefferson, yeah, he had problems. But also that same guy, in his original draft and integration, attacked the King of England for the transatlantic slave trade.”

Democrats in both the House and Senate said the legislation was putting too large of an emphasis on white American and European history and cultures, potentially preventing students from learning from more diverse perspectives. Democrats including Rep. Molly Buck, D-Ankeny, also criticized the bill as being overly restrictive of what content is covered in social studies and history courses.

Buck argued that while the bill does allow teachers to cover topics that are not highlighted in the bill, having a list of subjects that must be included through new state standards could functionally prevent teachers from going over other material they see as important, as classroom time would be overwhelmingly taken up by required topics.

She also said having an extensive list of requirements could prevent teachers from helping their students seriously engage with and appreciate the topics being discussed.

“Advocating for civics education that might prioritize rote learning over a deeper understanding of civic engagement and responsibility, I guess, is what really concerns me,” she said. “I don’t really feel like an approach that talks about rote learning or memorization prepares our children for the realities of participating in modern and diverse and complex engagement in our society.”

Buck, a 4th grade teacher, as well as several other Democrats with backgrounds in education, urged their Republican colleagues to leave educational standards and requirements to those in the field.

Rep. Steve Holt, R-Denison, said he respects education professionals but he does not believe “professionals should be the only ones who weigh in on American history.” He also said he supports the required coverage of specific events and people being included in the legislation, saying that outlining subjects that social studies classes must cover is needed for Iowa students to gain a full understanding of American history.

“I just kind of think that rote memorization gets a bad rap these days,” Holt said. “Certainly not the only thing we should be teaching, but it certainly needs to be a part of learning. Because I think without knowing certain facts, regardless of whatever the area might be, history or something else, I don’t know how citizens to make informed decisions.”

The House passed the bill 57-36. It goes next to the governor’s desk to be signed into law.

Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: [email protected] . Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and Twitter .

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The  National Archives and the University of Kentucky Libraries  Wendell H. Ford Public Policy Research Center are seeking self-nominations for the Earle C. Clements Innovation in Education Award for Civics and History Teachers.

Up to six civics, social studies, and history teachers from elementary, middle, and high schools throughout the Commonwealth of Kentucky will be selected for the Clements Award and will receive $1,000 each. 

The award criteria include the following:

• Teacher’s knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, their subject and a commitment to increasing student awareness of the importance of public service
• Impact on student success
• Evidence of creativity and innovation in the classroom

Applications are due Friday, May 17. 

Winners of the Clements Award will be notified in May and an award program will be held in early August at the UK Libraries  Special Collections Research Center.  

The Clements Award recognizes promising and innovative Kentucky educators and honors the life and career of the late Earle C. Clements and his lifelong commitment to education and public service. 

Find more information on award criteria and submit an application here .

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• Made by History

Beyoncé Backlash Is Part of a Century of Cowboy Gatekeeping

B eyoncé‘s Cowboy Carter album is dominating the country charts . Yet, it’s also provoked a backlash from those who think the pop star isn’t cowboy enough for the genre. One redditor proclaimed “OMG. She is not country. She just thinks if Taylor [Swift] can switch genres, she can.” Another redditor called her music “ghetto trash.”

And this isn’t the first time that some country artists and fans rejected Beyoncé. When she performed at the 2016 Country Music Awards, chart-topper Alan Jackson walked out and Travis Tritt tweeted , “I love honest to God country music and feel the need to stand up for it at all costs. We don’t need pop or rap artists to validate us.”

At their core, these responses encapsulate a historic belief that certain people get to decide who can be a cowboy and make cowboy music, and who can’t. This gatekeeping evolved alongside the iconic image itself during the Jim Crow era, helping ensure that Americans increasingly defined the cowboy as white, straight, and male. So successful was the equation of the cowboy with whiteness, that well into the 21st century, artists like Beyoncé are not just performing for their audiences but educating them on their right to exist in country-western, cowboy spaces. 

Historically, the American West, especially along the southwest border, was a racially diverse, multilingual, and sexually flexible space. Both enslaved and free Black people were central to the cattle industry that was a crucial part of the economy during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

After the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, when the U.S. claimed huge swaths of Mexico as the spoils of victory, an enslaved Black workforce, alongside some of the most powerful horse-based Indigenous tribes, helped adapt Hispanic vaquero culture into mounted North American herding practices. Historians estimate Black drovers, trainers, breeders, and herders—who were collectively referred to as cowboys—made up as much as a quarter of working ranch hands during the heyday of open-range ranching in the second half of the 19th century. In fact, the quintessential cowboy song, “Home on the Range,” was collected by a white musicologist from a Black cook on a Texas cattle trail.

Read More: Fans React to Beyoncé's New Album Cowboy Carter

Once seen as ruffians and pushed to the outskirts of Victorian society , cowboys were reinvented as rugged cultural heroes in the American consciousness in the early 20th century through dime novels, rodeos, movies, and more. Cowboys became an amalgamation of American rural identity; it didn’t matter if you were an Appalachian coal miner or a logger in the Pacific Northwest, you could be a cowboy. 

Cowboys also soon became associated with country music. Between the 1930s and 1950s, the use of cowboy hats and boots crafted the image of a more honky-tonk country artist who replaced the overall-wearing Appalachian “hillbilly” as the genre’s icon. At the same time as white southerners adopted the white cowboy as the symbol of country music, they increasingly shunted aside Black musicians , who previously had participated in the shared working-class genre, forcing them into a separate category: the blues. 

Segregation also started to affect the Black Americans who had actively participated in the popularization of “the cowboy” and the crafting of country-western culture , with rodeo and Wild West show performances by famed Black rodeoer Bill Pickett in the early 20th century and movies like Herb Jeffies’s Harlem on the Prairie (1937). Increasingly, they had to perform with care — and in many states, in separate spaces, after officials began enforcing Jim Crow laws in public places, including musical performances, movie showings, and rodeos. 

With the entrenchment of segregation laws and the reemergence of the KKK, rodeo producers and local discrimination laws forced Pickett and other Black rodeo stars to pose as Indigenous or Hispanic in places like Texas. And as white cowboys organized unions in the 1930s (eventually becoming the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association), women of all races and men of color were effectively pushed out of the highest earning rodeos around the country. In the mid-20th century, Texas’s highly exploitative prison rodeo —held at the state prison in Huntsville every Sunday in October from 1931 until 1986—was one of the few places an American could watch Black and white men perform as cowboys side-by-side.  

Responding to their exclusion from country music and rodeo, Indigenous and Black communities created vibrant rodeo and music circuits of their own that allowed them to perform safely. By the 1940s and '50s, San Antonio held numerous Black rodeos and local riders participated in the Southwestern Colored Rodeo Association, which organized a circuit of Black rodeos in central Texas, while other Texas communities incorporated Black rodeos into Juneteenth celebrations.

Yet, despite their perseverance, Cold War American popular culture featured two paradigmatic cowboys: John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. Neither had been actual range hands or even hailed from the regional West or South. But the two men — whether they were in films or engaged in politics— embodied a white, hypermasculine, taciturn, and violent ethos that defined Americans’ image of the cowboy, which became ubiquitous in popular culture. 

This ideal meant there was little space for Black country artists like Linda Martell, who Beyoncé referenced on Cowboy Carter . Executives, fans, and peers repeatedly told Martell she didn’t belong in the genre in the 1970s. The same went for many Black rodeo stars, who were not just told they didn’t belong but for decades faced intimidation and violence in rural, southern communities. Willie Thomas received death threats from the KKK in the 1950s, and Abe Morris was attacked at a Louisiana bar in the 1980s following a rodeo. 

Similarly, there was little room for gay men or lesbians in cowboy culture. Gay rodeo cowboys participated in the surge of popularity around country-western culture in the 1980s and 1990s, as line dancing replaced disco at many bars around the country, mechanical bull riding became a national pastime, and Garth Brooks became synonymous with country music and one of America’s biggest stars. Yet like Black Americans, LGBTQ+ riders were not welcomed on the mainstream rodeo circuit, and they too created their own space: the International Gay Rodeo Association. Even there, they faced community outrage and homophobic slurs . 

Despite the violence faced by queer cowboys and Black rodeoers for pushing the boundaries of the country-western world, country music has moved in new sonic and cultural directions over the last 30 years.

But there was a catch: fans and the country music industry have only allowed white artists to tweak the genre’s stylings. Artists like Brooks, as well as Beyoncé-naysayers Jackson and Tritt, were heralded as trailblazers for edging country and pop closer together in the 1990s, breaking with “tradition” themselves. Similarly, country music fans didn’t ask Taylor Swift, who hailed from suburban Pennsylvania, for her cowboy credentials when she entered the genre as a star-spangled pre-teen in the 2000s. Florida Georgia Line even featured the Black rapper Nelly on their song “Cruise,” which spent a record-breaking 24 weeks in 2013 at the top of Billboard’s Hot Country list.

Read More: Beyoncé Is Boldly Defying Country's Stereotypes

Yet, the country music industry and fans have regularly questioned the credibility of Black artists, continuing the gatekeeping traditions of the 20th century. After just one week on the Hot Country Songs chart in 2019, Billboard removed Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” from the list, arguing it “does not embrace enough elements of today's country music to chart in its current version.” Even when country music stalwart Billy Ray Cyrus came to the song’s defense , tweeting out, “it’s honest, humble, and has an infectious hook, and a banjo. What the hell more do ya need?” and collaborated on a remix, Billboard refused to back down.

The reaction to Cowboy Carter has reinforced how, at its root, many Americans see the “cowboy” as a stoic, white, straight man. Beyoncé hails from Texas, homeland of North American cowboy culture and country music luminaries like Willie Nelson and George Strait. And yet, everything from her use of rodeo queen imagery (derided as “White Woman Cosplay” by Black rapper Azealia Banks ) to her depiction of the American flag on the “Cowboy Carter” album cover has provoked backlash and questions about authenticity. 

But this shouldn’t be surprising. It’s the result of more than a century of history in which a large power structure worked to portray white, straight men as the cowboys, enshrining Jim Crow gatekeeping, and erasing a century of rangeland labor and country cultural production by Black Americans. Until that power structure is upended, the same pattern will continue to repeat itself.

Elyssa Ford is associate professor of history at Northwest Missouri State University. She is the author of Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Gender, Race, and Identity in the American Rodeo and Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo. Rebecca Scofield is associate professor of history and Chair of the Department of History at the University Idaho. She is the author of Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West and Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo . She is also the PI for the Gay Rodeo Oral History Project.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here . Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors .

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Write to Made by History / Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield at [email protected]

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Iowa Senate approves bill adding social studies, civics requirements for Iowa schools

By: robin opsahl - april 16, 2024 9:25 pm.

The legislation would require that students in grades 1 through 12 are taught about certain subjects in social studies and civics classes. (Photo illustration via Getty Images)

The Iowa Senate passed a bill Tuesday requiring Iowa schools to adopt new social studies and civics education standards to include a more focused coverage of events and subjects in U.S. history.

House File 2545 passed on a 33-14 vote and was sent to the Senate. It calls for the Iowa Department of Education director to conduct a review of Iowa school curriculum, education standards and high school graduation rates and give recommendations to the governor and General Assembly by July 1, 2025. The bill still includes this goal, but was amended on the floor to include another subject: history and social studies education.

Some of language in the amendment came from House File 2330 , a bill passed by the Iowa House in February but not taken up by the Senate. The original House bill would have mandated that history curriculum included subjects like the “history and meaning of the United States flag and national anthem,” “e xemplary figures in western civilization, the United States, and the state of Iowa” including Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as documents like the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation.

The Senate amendment includes similar provisions, requiring that “e xemplary figures and important events” from western civilization, U.S. and Iowa history are covered, as well as the model of the U.S. state and federal government “in comparison to alternative forms of government, and the crimes against humanity that have occurred under communist regimes since 1917.”

T he bill directs the Iowa Board of Education to conduct a review and revision of the state’s social studies standards to include these subjects for students in grades 1 through 12 in a relevant and age-appropriate manner. These standards would be adopted by Dec. 31, 2025.

Democrats in the Senate argued that the bill was overly prescriptive of schools. Sen. Molly Donahue, D-Cedar Rapids, said the Legislature has never put curriculum requirements in code, and that “it is not the job of the Legislature to prescribe the curriculum.”

Donahue said the provisions in the legislation came from the Civics Alliance , a conservative education advocacy organization, and does not include needed input from Iowa educators, parents and school boards. She said the bill “dumbs down history” for a political purpose, and would hurt Iowa students’ education in history, pointing to the mandate to cover documents like the Emancipation Proclamation but not requiring discussion of issues like slavery and Jim Crow laws.

“What we do here at the Capitol matters to our constituency,” Donahue said. “And the bills that we put forth in education need to build on education, build it up and provide the best opportunities for our students, not tear down the process, and not (tie) the hands of experts to teach students will help them to be able to compete globally in their futures, as well as to understand the world better.”

Sen. Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, offered an amendment that would have changed references to “western civilization” to “world civilization,” both to reflect the importance of non-American and European history and to reflect the history of people from diverse backgrounds in Iowa. The amendment failed.

Sen. Sandy Salmon, R-Janesville, said Democrats were presenting an overly negative characterization of Western civilization. The language does not prohibit schools from teaching about non-western civilizations, she said, but is intended to “focus our youth on who we are.”

“We’re Americans,” Salmon said. “We were born in western civilization, that’s our heritage. We have to understand that. And it’s really important we do, because that heritage has produced the freest, strongest, most prosperous nation — civilization — in the world. … Not that they don’t, shouldn’t be understanding other civilizations in the world, but they better understand what our heritage is, where we come from, so that they will be able to understand where we need to go.”

Quirmbach responded to Salmon saying that while western civilization has its own strengths and accomplishments, there has also been a history of mistakes and tragedies in U.S. and European history, including slavery and the Holocaust. He said the language in the bill focuses on white Americans and Europeans instead of reflecting the diversity of backgrounds in both the U.S. and Iowa.

Sen. Jeff Taylor, R-Sioux Center, called Democrats’ criticisms “grossly unfair.” He said the focus on western civilization is important because it is the foundational context of both American history and current culture, from its form of governance to the use of the English language. He said he agrees that America is a “nation of immigrants” and made up of people from across the world.

“Part of what we have, because we are a melting pot that … involves assimilation, is that as those immigrants come to the United States, they bring new things to our land. Their cultures, their languages, the words that they use — it all gets added to this this great experience of being an American, and that’s wonderful,” Taylor said. “But also, they blend in, and they start to appreciate not only what they as newcomers bring to our land, but what the founding fathers brought to our land.”

The bill goes back to the House for consideration.

Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our website. AP and Getty images may not be republished. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of any other photos and graphics.

Robin Opsahl

Robin Opsahl is an Iowa Capital Dispatch reporter covering the state Legislature and politics. They have experience covering government, elections and more at media organizations including Roll Call, the Sacramento Bee and the Wausau Daily Herald.

Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom , the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

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