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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.
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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.
