BY OLIVIER ZUNZ

The emergence of social history in the 1960s and 1970s as an innova-
tive intellectual movement profoundly affected historical conscious-
ness by broadening both the subject matter and methods of history.
The new praxis had a liberating quality. Pointing to the records of
ordinary lives as a source of evidence, social historians called into
question the merit of using the acts of elites as a measure of the past
and challenged historians in general to reexamine their assumptions,
regardless of their ideological commitments. This infusion of new
evidence and technique inspired reappraisal of theory as well as de-
tailed evocation of a new past. But social historians have embraced
so many problems and have engaged in so many inquiries that the
field now needs reordering. The reflections by five historians offered
in the following chapters are meant as part of this reassessment.
Our interest is in the future of social history and in the integration
of varied studies in large syntheses. We are not concerned specifi-
cally with the history of ordinary people--inasmuch as significant
proportions of this history have now been written--but with the
ways specialists of different regions of the world choose to see the
connections between major transformations--ideological, political,
economic, and social--and the form and character of lives shaped in
different environments.

The factors that contributed to the pivotal role of social history
during the last thirty years are well known. First, its growth paralleled
the demographic surge of historians. The new field benefited from
an unprecedented number of able young intellectuals who shared in
the excitement of enlarging the vision of history. Second, the meth-
ods of social history were enriched by the post-World War II dis-
course between scientists and humanists at universities and research
institutes. In particular, social historians drew methods from all of

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