I could simmer down but i like my self better shen im all feisty and Shirt
‘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.
I could simmer down but i like my self better shen im all feisty and Shirt
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.
