Murray Murphey and the Possibility of Social Science History

1985 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerome M. Clubb
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Science History ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Scientific

Application of social scientific methods and approaches to the study of history has always been the subject of considerable and often acrimonious debate. In recent years, however, the terms of the debate have taken a somewhat different and, to some of us, surprising turn. Notes of pessimism and defensiveness have entered the arguments of practitioners; some feel the need to repeat the once useful polemics of twenty odd years ago; and there is talk of the intrinsic limitations of the general enterprise. At the same time, the traditionalist camp announces with a measure of glee that the tides of social scientific history are on the wane.

The Automated Archivist: Interdisciplinarity and the Process of Historical Research

1985 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-184
Author(s):  
Chad Gaffield ◽  
Peter Baskerville
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Science History ◽  
Systematic Data ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relevant Evidence ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Rigorous Study ◽  
Social Scientific

The basis of most historical research including social science history is quite unsystematic. This characteristic results from the ways in which researchers find and choose historical sources for examination. Despite claims to be systematic, historians still tend to identify relevant evidence in impressionistic ways. Many social science histories involve the rigorous study of a source happily discovered by chance. Of course, access to the past has never been easy. Researchers have always lamented a presumed lack of “essential” records. Nonetheless, the actual ways we discover existing evidence have received little attention despite the fact that this process is fraught with difficulties and hidden dangers especially for researchers of a social scientific bent. Do not the presuppositions of social science history extend to the identification of sources? How do we know when we have all the “relevant data” for a particular project? Can systematic data analysis be justifiably built upon unsystematic identification of sources?

Reflections on an Old “New History” Quantitative Social Science History in Postmodern Middle Age

1989 ◽  
Vol 22 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 408-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric A. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
English Language ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Language Translation ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Annales School ◽  
Historical Methods

Not very long ago quantitative historians were on the offensive. Only a decade back the eminent “Annales School” French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie stated in the English language translation of a work he had published a decade earlier in his native language that “tomorrow's historian will have to be able to program a computer in order to survive,” and that “history that is not quantifiable cannot claim to be scientific.” In America, where even more champions of quantitative work resided, several new journals were founded in the 1970s such as the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Historical Methods, and Social Science History which were explicitly devoted to new social scientific approaches to the study of history and above all to quantitative approaches. And even in Germany, which seemed the most immune to the quantitative contagion of all the major western lands, owing perhaps to its long entrenched historicist traditions and to its historians' preoccupations with the tragic happenings of its still recent past, the decade of the seventies saw the development of several new outlets for quantitative and social scientific historical research such as Geschichte und Gesellschaft and Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung. Hence to most professional historians, whether they liked it or not, quantitative history appeared to be the wave of the future, and ignoring the new possibilities offered by the computer appeared to risk being relegated to the proverbial dustbin.

People’s History and Social Science History

1983 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-474
Author(s):  
Louise A. Tilly
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Volume History

A friend and colleague of an author reviews a two-volume history. Acknowledging his relationship with the author the reviewer calls the books “excellent, full of rich new insights, sparkling with intelligence, the sentiment which underlies our empassioned love for the historian’s craft, one of the most beautiful of the discplines devoted to the study of man.” “Yet,” the reviewer continues, “it is striking that the individual is almost entirely absent…. Psychology, although not totally ignored, is always collective psychology.…Is not the author,” the review continues, “turning back to the schematic.…toward the sociological, a seductive form of the abstract?” (Febvre, 1941b: 177, 128).Sit back and imagine the time, place, and people involved in this story: a 1980s traditional historian, perhaps a radical people’s historian, excoriating a social scientific colleague? Not at all; this is no case of contemporary backlash. The time was 1941, the review Lucien Febvre, the author Marc Bloch, the book, La société féodale.

The Social Science History Association at 40: A Savory Chop Suey

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-563
Author(s):  
Susan Boslego Carter
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Multidisciplinary Research ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Geographic Regions ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Academic Rewards

Multidisciplinary conversations are tough. Language, habits of thinking, and styles of presentation and criticism differ profoundly across disciplines. Academic rewards to multidisciplinary research are unpredictable. Yet year after year, for 40 years running now, the Social Science History Association (SSHA) has hosted increasingly large, multidisciplinary conferences that attract scholars from a diverse set of academic fields and geographic regions. By fostering debate in an atmosphere of civility, respect, and inclusiveness, the SSHA has become a premiere venue for introducing the latest in social scientific topics, methods, and data. Here I salute the founders and guardians of the culture responsible for this impressive achievement with a multidisciplinary foray into the history of America's chop suey craze of the early twentieth century. Like the remarkable history of the SSHA, the history of chop suey illustrates the importance of civility, respect, and democratic inclusiveness in fostering innovation. It is a story that celebrates the rewards to institutions that promote such virtues.

scholarly journals The Revivalism of Narrative: A Response to Recent Criticisms of Quantitative History

1984 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Morgan Kousser
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Degree Of Acceptance ◽  
Employment Trends ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Historical Profession

In his presidential address to the Social Science History Association Convention in November 1981, Robert William Fogel declared sanguinely that social scientific historians had won their battle for legitimacy within the historical profession in America, and that we should now stop feeling embattled, spend less effort proselytizing, and calmly go on with our substantive work. While his statistics on the occupational advancement of social scientific historians do indicate a degree of acceptance, and while his advice to worry less and pay attention to business will be followed (as that is what nearly all of us were doing anyway), I am less optimistic than Fogel, read the employment trends differently, and see more signs of a reaction against quantitative social scientific history—or what I like to refer to as QUASSH—than he does (Kousser, 1980). Perhaps Professor Fogel and I differ only temperamentally. As a former Marxist, he still retains a bit of faith in the inevitable triumph of progressive forces; as a former Methodist, I am unable to shake off the pessimism that is the psychological residue of the doctrine of original sin. In any case, whereas Fogel seems to think that most recent criticisms of QUASSH are so obviously flawed as to require no answer, I fear that some people, especially those with substantial investments in “history-as-it-used-to-be-done,” may still be susceptible to false messiahs or, perhaps more precisely, false Jeremiahs.

Reflections on Local Population Studies and Social Science History

2018 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Osamu Saito
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Population Studies ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Local Source ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Source Materials

This personal reflection of more than 40 years' work on the supply of labour in a household context discusses the relationship between social science history (the application to historical phenomena of the tools developed by social scientists) and local population studies. The paper concludes that historians working on local source materials can give something new back to social scientists and social science historians, urging them to remake their tools.

Theory, Method, and Social Reproduction in Social Science History: A Short Jeremiad

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-499
Author(s):  
Charles Wetherell
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Formal Methods ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Theory Method ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Collective Enterprise

Let me begin with a simple theme, repentance, and a simple message: repent from complacency in the practice and defense of social science history (SSH). I say this because I do not see social science historians meeting three major challenges that must be overcome if the larger, collective enterprise is to survive with the same vitality it had a decade ago. Those challenges are, first, to bring social theory forcefully back into historical research; second, to take formal methods to a new, higher level; and, third, to seek to train the next generation of social science historians in the theory and methods they will need in the next century.

Life Cycles in Social Science History

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-489
Author(s):  
Andrew Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Science History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Definition Of

When one is asked to speak on the past, present, and future of social science history, one is less overwhelmed by the size of the task than confused by its indexicality. Whose definition of social science history? Which past? Or, put another way, whose past? Indeed, which and whose present? Moreover, should the task be taken as one of description, prescription, or analysis? Many of us might agree on, say, a descriptive analysis of the past of the Social Science History Association. But about the past of social science history as a general rather than purely associational phenomenon, we might differ considerably. The problem of description versus prescription only increases this obscurity.

Is There a Place for Anthropology in Social Science History?

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-559
Author(s):  
Alice Bee Kasakoff
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
One Dimension ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Secure Place

Imagine a fourfold table in which one dimension is “present versus past” and the other “exotic versus home.” Traditionally, social and cultural anthropology’s domain has been the exotic’s present and history’s domain the home’s past. A third box, the home’s present, has been occupied by sociology, while the fourth, the exotic’s past, has usually been the province of anthropologists too because other disciplines—with the exception, perhaps, of ethnohistorians—are usually even less interested in exotic peoples’ past than in their present. These domains are now in flux. I argue, in what follows, that only when the oversimplified ideas about time and space that have created them are seriously questioned will anthropology find a secure “place” in social science history.

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