scholarly journals The Agenda for “Social Science History”

1977 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-391
Author(s):  
J. Morgan Kousser
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Political History ◽  
First Year ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History

I want to take as my texts today statements made to me in correspondence and conversation by two senior quantitative historians. Each statement illustrates what I believe to be misjudgments about the proper methodological priorities for quantitative historians in America today. To spare these historians from publicity which their casual statements were not intended to invite, but mostly to protect myself against reprisal, I shall not name them here.The first statement arose because I assigned a particular book in my American Political History course. Some of my colleagues, students, and I were critical of the methodology employed in the book, and a student suggested we might reanalyze the data, employing different techniques. The data set, however, was rather obscure and was apparently not available at any major archive. When I wrote to the author, rather brashly asking for a copy of his computer tapes, I was informed that he had “lost interest” in the project after the first year or so and discarded most of the tapes and IBM cards.

Great Expectations and Secular Depreciation: The First Ten Years of the Social Science History Association

1987 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan G. Bogue
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Political History ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Draft Report ◽  
Science History ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social

The idea of forming a new scholarly association has been generated in the lonely study of scholars hungry for supportive contact, in the interaction of kindred seekers in convention bars or bull sessions, and no doubt, in many other kinds of circumstances. The Social Science History Association began as an exercise in transmogrification, and although, in retrospect, its origin may appear to have been an act of secession, it was not intended as such. Institutional manifestation of what came to be called the “New Political History” was apparent as early as 1957 when a small group of historians interested in the political history of the American early national period met at Rutgers under the sponsorship of the Social Science Research Council to discuss the methodology of political history. The draft report of that conference, prepared by Richard P. McCormick (1957), rather accurately forecast significant developments during the next decade.

Introduction to Roundtable

1998 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole Turbin
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social History ◽  
Political History ◽  
Graduate Course ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Challenges

Like many other social science historians, since the late 1980s I have reflected on how postmodernist thinkers like Foucault and Derrida are useful for historians. In 1995 I taught a graduate course on the history of social history, and I looked back on the origins of the field through the eyes of my students who were intrigued with postmodernism. I realized that time has crept up on me. I barely noticed that this field that we developed over the years is no longer young but has come of age and is now part of the accepted canon, one of many subdisciplines. Indeed, my students thought of social science history in much the same way that social science historians viewed traditional political history, a field whose assumptions and perspectives should be critically analyzed, challenged, and revised. These students helped me to see postmodernist criticisms in a new light, not as a sharp break from social science history but rather as emerging at least in part from long-term developments within the field itself. The contributors to the debate on these pages see postmodernism in this way. In various ways, they contend that these challenges, poststructuralist and otherwise, can help us to see within social science history contradictions and tensions that result in both strengths and weaknesses. We can learn from postmodernism without accepting it uncritically; we can reevaluate materialist social history in light of new challenges without rejecting social science history's benefits.

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.

Personal Reflections on the 1982 Special Anthropometric Issue of Social Science History

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley L. Engerman
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Human Growth ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Bureau ◽  
Science History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
Christopher Lasch ◽  
Personal Reflections

Looking back at the more than 20 years that have gone by since the 1982 special issue of Social Science History, it is interesting to observe how important the study of anthropometric data has been in contributing to economic history and related disciplines.While there had been numerous earlier comments by contemporary observers as well as by scholars about heights and their implications as seen in JamesTanner's marvelous study, A History of the Study of Human Growth (1981), the systematic work that was reflected in the 1982 volume was then only about six or seven years old in the United States. It represented the early output of a study directed by Robert Fogel, primarily through the Development of the American Economy (DAE) project of the National Bureau of Economic Research.There had been a few previous publications including my own piece in Local Population Studies (Engerman 1976). My first use of the height-by-age data was in response to a dinnerparty conversation in 1974 with two ofmy colleagues in the Rochester history department:Herbert Gutman and Christopher Lasch.

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