Himmelfarb, Gertrude. "The Writing of Social History: Recent Studies of 19th Century England." Journal of British Studies 11, no. 1. 1971.

Abstract:

As a genre, social history is far from new. But the claims now being made for it and the vogue it is presently enjoying are new.2 And it is this enlargement of claim and fame that present us with a new set of problems: Does social history have an independent status? How does it relate to other disciplines and modes of his- tory? What are its characteristic features, potentialities, and limitations? The subject has been much discussed in the abstract, and to little avail, the questions yielding no more satisfactory answers than similar questions put to psychoanalytic history, quantitative history, and the like.In this case, as in the others, we might do better to inquire into specific examples of the genre, to see what in the way of social history is being written, how it is written, and what it all adds up to.

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