Edward Miller 1915–2000

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
BARBARA HARVEY ◽  
PETER LINEHAN
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Deep Understanding ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
The Social ◽  
Separate Treatment ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
History Of Europe ◽  
To Receive

Edward Miller's deep understanding of the history of Europe, together with meticulous scholarship and an equable temperament, made him an ideal editor of wide-ranging works with many different contributors to keep on the rails. His interests as a scholar centred, however, on the social and economic history of medieval England. As discussion of these themes gathered momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, and social history acquired the quantitative dimension that economic history already possessed, they tended increasingly to receive separate treatment. Miller always regarded them as inseparable and believed that neither could be understood apart from a legal and constitutional context.

Social History in Serbia: The Association for Social History

2008 ◽  
Vol 34-35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 369-381
Author(s):  
Radina Vučetić ◽  
Olga Manojlović Pintar
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
The University

This review essay provides a brief overview of the research and publication activity of the Udruženje za društvenu istoriju/Association for Social History, an innovative scholarly organization established in 1998 in Belgrade, Serbia. The association promotes research on social history in modern South-Eastern Europe, with a focus on former Yugoslavia, and publishes scientific works and historical documents. The driving force behind the activity of the association is a group of young social historians gathered around Professor Andrej Mitrović, at the University of Belgrade. Prof. Mitrović’s work on the “social history of culture” has provided a scholarly framework for a variety of new works dealing with issues of modernization, history of elites, history of ideas, and the diffuse relationship between history and memory. Special attention is given to the Association’s journal, Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju/Annual for Social History, which published studies on economic history, social groups, gender issue, cultural history, modernization, and the history of everyday life in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Methodologically routed in social history, these research projects are interdisciplinary, being a joint endeavor of sociologists, art historians, and scholars of visual culture.

Some Reflections on the Pre-Industrial City

Urban History ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 13-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
The Social ◽  
Tribal Societies ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Europe ◽  
The City

In the last few years, a new word has gained popularity among historians: ‘pre-industrial’. Specialists in the social and economic history of Europe before 1800 have become increasingly aware that the object of their studies is simply one case among others of what sociologists call ‘traditional society’, and that it is easier to understand traditional or pre-industrial Europe if it is compared and contrasted with other societies of this type. Thus Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane have illuminated English witchcraft by making comparisons with witchcraft in African tribal societies, while Frédéric Mauro and Witold Kula, among others, have compared the economies of early modern Europe with those of the developing countries today. Even Richard Cobb, no great friend to the social sciences, has recorded that he came to understand eighteenth-century Paris better after visiting contemporary Calcutta. In fact, the city is an obvious and splendidly tangible unit of comparison, and it is not surprising that the term ‘pre-industrial city’ is passing into general use.

The Baronetcy of the Skellingthorpe Vavasor

1985 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-312
Author(s):  
Kenneth E. Cutler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Social History ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Interesting Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Made In

On 22 June 1631 the government of Charles I issued Letters Patent proclaiming Captain Sir Charles Vavasor of Skellingthorpe, Lines., a baronet. The grant of honors to Sir Charles Vavasor was among the most distinctive made in England during the seventeenth century. By its special terms, Sir Charles became the first baronet (of approximately 285) to receive rights of precedence—in spite of parliamentary statutes opposing such rights. A clause of precedency declared the title retroactive to 29 June 1611, and that, in turn, made Sir Charles's father, Sir Thomas Vavasor, who had died in 1620, a baronet post mortem. The baronetcy of Sir Charles Vavasor is also unusual as one of the few which did not depend upon the patronage of the Duke of Buckingham, as the only one created during the whole of 1631, and as the last one created before the eve of Civil War.The competition for honors among the gentry is an important element in the social history of early seventeenth century England, and a factor in the complex origins of the Civil War. The full dimensions of that competition can be illuminated by studying the motives of individual families, and the processes by which they achieved their titles. The Skellingthorpe Vavasor make an especially interesting study because of the unusual distinctions which attend their title.Heretofore, however, paucity of evidence made it nearly impossible to reconstruct the quest for honors of the Skellingthorpe Vavasor. The evidence did show that before he died in 1620, Sir Thomas Vavasor sought the title of baronet without success, and that eleven years later, Sir Thomas's son, Charles, finally received a baronetcy with precedency. The intervening years, 1620-1631, had to be filled with conjectures about Charles Vavasor's motives, timing, and patronage, and also with some conjectures about why the government granted him honors of dubious legality.

Jüdische Haarhändler – Die Geschichte eines in Vergessenheit geratenen Gewerbes

Aschkenas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-344
Author(s):  
Robert Jütte
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Human Hair ◽  
General Transformation ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract Studies in cultural, religious and social history reveal that hair has diverse socio-religious and symbolic value in Jewish society and tradition. The focus of previous studies has, however, lied on issues such as specific hairstyle or the halakhic justifications for religious wig-wearing The present paper sets out to illuminate a related yet uncharted topic: the social and economic history of the wig trade in which Jews played an important role. The focus is on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period marked by great tensions within the Jewish community. It was these tensions that turned the question of wig-wearing and the dynamics of supply into an issue that reflected the general transformation that Jewish society was undergoing in this period. Hair fashion is, of course, not necessarily a matter of only halakhic interest, and indeed the history of the trade with human hair also reveals new aspects of the economic history of Jews.

AGRICULTURAL HISTORY, RURAL HISTORY, OR COUNTRYSIDE HISTORY?

2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 465-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEREMY BURCHARDT
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Rural History ◽  
New School ◽  
Agricultural Revolution ◽  
History Of Agriculture ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Countryside ◽  
Rural England

This article assesses the state of modern English rural history. It identifies an ‘orthodox’ school, focused on the economic history of agriculture. This has made impressive progress in quantifying and explaining the output and productivity achievements of English farming since the ‘agricultural revolution’. Its celebratory account was, from the outset, challenged by a dissident tradition emphasizing the social costs of agricultural progress, notably enclosure. Recently a new school, associated with the journal Rural History, has broken away from this narrative of agricultural change, elaborating a wider social history. The work of Alun Howkins, the pivotal figure in the recent historiography, is located in relation to these three traditions. It is argued that Howkins, like his precursors, is constrained by an increasingly anachronistic equation of the countryside with agriculture. The concept of a ‘post-productivist’ countryside, dominated by consumption and representation, has been developed by geographers and sociologists and may have something to offer historians here, in conjunction with the well-established historiography of the ‘rural idyll’. The article concludes with a call for a new countryside history, giving full weight to the cultural and representational aspects that have done so much to shape twentieth-century rural England. Only in this way will it be possible to move beyond a history of the countryside that is merely the history of agriculture writ large.

Reconceptualizing the Social: East Central Europe and the New Sociocultural History

2008 ◽  
Vol 34-35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constantin Iordachi
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Future Research ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Catching Up ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Europe

This introductory essay reviews recent debates on social history, with a focus on the revival of this field of studies in post-communist East Central Europe and its potential impact on rejuvenating approaches to the social history of Europe. The first part of the essay provides a brief overview of the emergence of social history as a reaction to the dominant political history of the nineteenth century and its crystallization in different national schools, and highlights recent responses to the poststructuralist and postmodern critiques of “the social.” The second part focuses on traditions of social history research in East Central Europe, taking Poland and Romania as main examples. The third part summarizes the main claims of the articles included in this issue and evaluates their implications for future research. It is argued that, at first glance, post-communist historiography in East Central Europe provides the picture of a discipline in transformation, still struggling to break up with the past and to rebuild its institutional framework, catching up with recent trends and redefining its role in continental and global historiography. The recent attempts to invigorate research in traditional fields of social history might seem largely obsolete, not only out of tune with international developments but also futile reiterations of vistas that have been for long experimented with and superseded in Western Europe. At closer scrutiny, however, historiography in East Central Europe appears—unequal and variegated as it is—as a laboratory for historical innovation and a field of experimentation, and interaction of scholars from various disciplines and scholarly traditions, in which old and new trends amalgamate in peculiar ways. It is suggested that the tendency to reconceptualize the “social” that we currently witness in humanities and social sciences worldwide could be not only reinforced but also cross-fertilized by the “social turn” in East Central Europe, potentially leading to novel approaches.

Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain. By Keith Wrightson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xii, 372. $35.00.

2001 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1124-1125
Author(s):  
Craig Muldrew
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Student Interest ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Rutgers University ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
English Society ◽  
History Of

For almost 20 years now, Professor Wrightson's book English Society 1580–1680 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982) has probably been the most widely used text to introduce the social history of England in this period. But at the same time it is much more than this, in that it presents a powerful argument about change in religious belief, education, social hegemony, and concepts of order, all of which has provoked much scholarly debate. Now Wrightson has produced a volume on the economic history of Britain in the longer period from 1470–1750, which deserves to become as central and as widely read. Its arrival is doubly welcome because, since Christopher Clay's Economic Expansion and Social Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) went out of print some time ago, there has been no current text covering the economic history of early modern England or Britain. In part this unfortunate situation has reflected declining student interest, as economic history became identified with econometrics. But this lucid and engaging work should revive interest in a vitally important subject. As its title indicates, this is economic history with a human face, in which the main focus of analysis is always the social context and meaning of economic change to those whom it affected.

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