Social History would be termed ‘social geography’ there has been too Jones E 1975 Readings in Social Geography. Oxford University little interaction between those researchers working on Press, Oxford, UK developing and developed countries. There are, how- Johnston R J 1987 Theory and methodology in social geo- ever, some indications that this is changing with graphy. In: Pacione M (ed.) Social Geography: Progress and Prospect. Croom Helm, London greater appreciation of the implications of the globali- Johnston R L, Gregory D, Smith D M 1994 The Dictionary of zation of communication and economic relationships Human Geography, 3rd edn. Blackwell, Oxford, UK and the significance of diasporic cultures. Meinig D (ed.) 1979 The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. For many social geographers the growth of cultural Oxford University Press, New York geography presents an opportunity to combine many Pahl R 1965 Trends in social geography. In: Chorley R J, of the themes of the two sub-disciplines in fruitful Haggett P (eds.) Frontiers in Geographical Teaching. Methuen, investigation of social inequality and difference and to London focus on and destabilize definitions of a wider range of Pahl 1975 Whose City? 2nd edn. Penguin, Harmondsworth, UK ‘social groups’—such as disabled people and gay and Rex J 1968 The sociology of a zone in transition. In: Pahl R E (ed.) Readings in Urban Sociology. Pergamon Press, Oxford, lesbian people. Social geographers’ tradition of pol- UK itical engagement and ethnographic research can Smith D 1977 Human Geography: A Welfare Approach. Edward combine positively with cultural geographers’ sen- Arnold, New York sitivity to discourse and symbolic expression of dif- Shevky E, Bell W 1955 Social Area Analysis. Stanford University ference. The rapprochements between social, cultural, Press, Stanford, CA and development geographers seem likely to produce valuable research. Nevertheless, the term ‘social geo- S. Bowlby graphy’ on its own—as opposed to ‘social and cultural geography’ or ‘social and development geo- graphy’—seems likely to revert to its earlier obscur- ity. See also: Access: Geographical; Behavioral Geo- Social History graphy; Crime, Geography of; Critical Realism in Geography; Cultural Geography; Disability, Geo- The term ‘social history’ refers to a subdiscipline of the graphy of; Gender and Feminist Studies in Geo- historical sciences on the one hand and to a general graphy; Humanistic Geography; Marxist Geography; approach to history that focuses on society at large on Postcolonial Geography; Postmodern Urbanism; the other hand. In both manifestations social history Postmodernism in Geography; Qualitative Methods developed from marginal and tentative origins at the in Geography; Residential Segregation: Geographic end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the Aspects; Rural Geography; Sexuality and Geography; twentieth centuries and experienced a triumphant ex- pansion from the 1950s to the 1980s. Throughout, Space and Social Theory in Geography; Spatial social history can be best defined in terms of what it Analysis in Geography; Time-geography; Urban wants not to be or against that to which it proposes an Geography; Urban System in Geography alternative. On one hand it distinguished itself from political history, which had been dominant during most of the Bibliography nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Conse- quently, the ‘social’ in social history meant dealing Bowlby S R, McDowell L 1987 The feminist challenge to social with the structures of societies and social change, geography. In: Pacione M (ed.) Social Geography: Progress social movements, groups and classes, conditions of and Prospect. Croom Helm, London work and ways of life, families, households, local Castells M 1976 Theoretical propositions for an experimental study of urban social movements. In: Pickvance C (ed.) Urban communities, urbanization, mobility, ethnic groups, Sociology: Critical essays. Methuen, London etc. On the other hand social history challenged Giddens A 1981 A Contemporary Critique of Historical Mat- dominant historical narratives which were constructed erialism. Macmillan, London around the history of politics and the state or around Gould P, White R 1974 Mental Maps. Penguin, London the history of ideas by stressing instead social change Hagerstrand T 1975 Space, time and human conditions. In: as a core dimension around which historical synthesis Karlqvist A, Lundqvist L, Snickars F (eds.) Dynamic Al- and diagnosis of the contemporary world should be location of Urban Space. Saxon House, Farnborough, UK, pp. organized. With these aims in mind, social historians 3–14 (including historical sociologists and economic histor- Hanson S, Pratt G 1995 Gender, Work and Space. Routledge, New York ians) sought to uncover the relationships between Harvey D 1973 Social Justice and the City. Edward Arnold, economic, demographic and social processes and London structures, as well as their impact on political insti- Jackson P, Smith S 1984 Exploring Social Geography. Allen and tutions, the distribution of resources, social move- Unwin, London ments, shared worldviews, and forms of public and 14299 Social History private behavior. For the comprehensive variant of in Strasbourg. Not surprisingly, their journal was first ‘social history,’ the term ‘history of society’ (Gesell- called Annales d’histoire eT conomique et sociale schaftsgeschichte) has gained currency. Not only in (1929–1939). The international exchanges and mutual Western Europe and North America but also in other observation between some of the protagonists of parts of the world, the establishment, expansion, and historiographic innovations in the early decades of the specialization of social history belong among the twentieth century were intense. Thus, only two years significant trends of interwar and particularly postwar after the French flagship, the Polish journal Roczniki intellectual and academic life. Nevertheless, in recent dziejow spolecznych i gospodarczych (Yearbooks for years, it shares with other fields of the humanities and social and economic history) appeared. These early social sciences a ‘time of doubts’ (Chartier 1993), a journals shared a further characteristic which dist- period of challenges from interpretative, construc- inguished them from the mainstream political history tivist, and discursive approaches (Palmer 1990, around them, namely a keen interest for ‘universal,’ Bonnel and Hunt 1999). non-nationalistic history. In Germany, social and economic history remained a specialized branch without much impact on general 1. Early Institutionalization (Late history. In England, economic history maintained Nineteenth–Early Twentieth Century) close links to social themes. After World War II, the French Annales historians tended to move Like other generations of historians in the twentieth their journal away from its earlier identification with century that have at some point used the label ‘new’ this ‘subdiscipline.’ Similarly, the program represented for themselves, the claim to innovation by social by Ernest Labrousse for a history of class relations historians in the 1960s and 1970s obscured the rich taking as its starting point the economic ‘basis’ diversity of predecessors and competitors, which goes broadened out more and more into the areas of urban back to the second half of the nineteenth century history, quantitative analysis of social strata and the (Kocka 1986). In that period, the academic profes- integral description of regional societies. Where ‘social sionalization and disciplinary differentiation of econ- and economic history’ continued to be an insti- omics, sociology, and political science on the one hand tutionalized specialty, it did not necessarily figure as and history on the other prevailed. an area of major innovations, as was later the case The mutual contact zones or, by contrast, the with the ‘new’ history of the 1960s and 1970s. strength of boundaries were marked by significant These early efforts to establish a specialized field national differences. The resulting interactions and and an alternative view of history with ‘society’ as the hierarchies between these ‘fields of knowledge’ (Ringer main object and organizing principle of analysis were 1992) differed in respect to the amount of space they paralleled by similar movements in various countries. provided for historical approaches. The ‘Historical In the USA, the New History of the turn of the century; School’ of political economy in Germany, dominant in in France, Henri Berr with his Reue de SyntheZ se the last third of the nineteenth century, is a case in (Historique) starting in 1900 and the reception of point. It was part of economics and did not gain much Durkheimian sociology by historians; in Germany, recognition in the discipline of history. Some pro- the development of a historical sociology by Max fessional historians took part in a process of specializ- Weber and others; and in Great Britain in the first half ation in ‘social and economic history’ that kept a of the twentieth century the impulses of George Unwin critical distance as much from this strand of economics and R. H. Tawney for the development of an economic as from the traditional history of great men, events, history that included social and cultural factors, were and ideas. The development of the combined field all among the most influential strands of socio- ‘social and economic history’ marked a double oppo- historical thinking (Iggers 1975). sition, on the one hand to the history