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.

What is Social Science History, Anyway?

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-480
Author(s):  
Paula Baker
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Science History ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Methodologies

This group of essays came out of an attempt to address the “usually unasked,” “bound to embarrass” question that Eric Monkkonen raised in his 1994 presidential address to the Social Science History Association. As both the social sciences and history have been reshaped in recent years by intellectual tendencies variously labeled “postmodernism,” “poststructuralism,” or the “linguistic turn,” the never especially clear relationship between the social sciences and history has grown even more muddy. The essays that follow are drawn from two sessions of the 1998 annual program of the Social Science History Association. The sessions brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines and cohorts who held divergent ideas about the links between social science and history and different substantive agendas for explaining historical change. A mix of essays that highlight new methodologies for analyzing the past and pieces that offer explanations or remedies, the articles printed here point to some of the central issues in the debate about what social science history might mean today.

Perhaps We Can Talk

2011 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-212
Author(s):  
David B. Ryden
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Science History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Interdisciplinary Exchange ◽  
Presidential Session

The title of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association in 2007 was “History and the Social Sciences: Taking Stock and Moving Ahead.” David I. Kertzer (2007), the president of the association at that time, explained that the focus of the conference was to determine “how far we have come in social science history” and to isolate “the most promising avenues for research.” The following essays were presented at the presidential session, titled “The Past, Present, and Future of Economics for History.” The presenters put forward a number of provocative arguments before a fully engaged audience, whose numbers spilled into the hallway of Chicago's Palmer House. While the authors were all economists by training and by department affiliation, there was an intense interdisciplinary exchange between audience members and the panelists. The session, in short, was a huge success in generating a range of ideas about the future of economics for history.

Data Dilemmas: Quantitative Data and the Social Science History Association

1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 204-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan G. Bogue
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Machine Readable

At this stage in the development of the Social Science History Association it is appropriate for us to consider some of the general problems concerning the development and use of machine-readable data and the Association’s role in such matters.

Early American Historiography and Social Science History

1982 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Scott Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
American History ◽  
Association Network ◽  
Science History ◽  
Early American History ◽  
Early American ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

Despite the emergence of social science history, the profession remains organized around the study of periods in the history of societies. Departments of history still structure their curricula mainly along national and temporal lines, and the same principle of socialization thereby defines most academic positions (Darnton, 1980). To judge by the sessions of the annual meetings of the Social Science History Association (SSHA), those sympathetic with that orientation focus on topics, approaches, and methodologies. Only one association network, that for the study of Asia, mentions a locale in its title, and none specifies a particular time period. This article will examine the findings and implications of social science history for one well-established national/period field, that of early American history.

Bureaucratic Development and Social Science History

1978 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-384
Author(s):  
Don Karl Rowney
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
The State ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Bureaucracy ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Political Decisions

The following essays originated in a session of the Social Science History Association in October, 1976. Two of the participants, Bernard S. Silberman and Alfred J. Rieber, were asked to prepare studies of bureaucracy in Japan and Russia which also dealt with the problems of political power relationships in developing bureaucracies. A third participant, Cyril E. Black, was asked to compare, criticize, and synthesize the first two papers in a third paper of his own. Briefly, the substantive point of these essays as a group is that they deal with the effect of political decisions in achieving certain changes in economic, technical, and military structures and operations. They focus attention on the effects within a complex apparatus set up to administer those political decisions, the state bureaucracy. The essays themselves reveal, and Black’s synthesis details, that the points of similarity between Japan and Russia as they change across time are as numerous and instructive as are the differences. In this introduction, I will call attention to some aspects of these studies which, although technical, are nevertheless important to the research enterprise they represent.

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?

scholarly journals Lessons of Social Science History

1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric H. Monkkonen
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Chinese Restaurant ◽  
The Social

I am pleased to be able to address this, the eighteenth annual meeting of the Social Science History Association. I have many valued memories of presidential addresses, but my favorite was Jerry Clubb’s 1984 talk in the Chinese restaurant in Toronto, where speakers, waiters, and many other patrons all competed in a cacophonic, noisy free-for-all. Jerry did not even try to finish the talk, so we had to wait until it appeared in the journal (Clubb 1986).

scholarly journals Editor's Introduction to Volume 40, Issue 1

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Anne EC McCants
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Science History ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Parent Organization ◽  
The Social ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Scholarly Inquiry

With this issue, Social Science History begins its fortieth year of publication. The journal is also in its second year of publication with Cambridge University Press. So this seems an especially propitious moment to take stock of who we are and how we conceive of our mission, to both our parent organization and to the wider world of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry. Since our founding in 1976, the journal remains firmly rooted in the organizational and intellectual apparatus of the Social Science History Association (SSHA). We embrace the cross-disciplinary and grassroots “network” structure of the annual meetings in forming our Editorial Board, with its rotating membership and diverse representation from across the historical and social science disciplines. We actively seek out new scholarship, as well as encourage SSHA members to propose special issues that address a common theme or scholarly question from multiple disciplinary points of view and address different places and time periods. But we also remain fundamentally historical in our purview, dedicated to “improv[ing] the quality of historical explanation in every manner possible, but particularly by encouraging the selective use and adaptation in historical . . . research of relevant theories and methods from related disciplines, particularly the social sciences.”

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document