"What is Social History?"

Harvard FAS

“The intellectual historian may (at his risk) pay no attention to economics, the economic historian to Shakespeare, but the social historian who neglects either will not get far. Conversely, while it is extremely improbable that a monograph on provençal poetry will be economic history or one on inflation in the sixteenth century intellectual history, both could be treated in a way to make them social history.” So wrote Eric Hobsbawm in the winter of 1971. Up until then, much academic and…