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Some Notes on the New Social History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Robert E. Gallman
Robert E. Gallman
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
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Extract

Some time ago I picked up a magazine that contained an article by Red Smith, a man whose work I try not to miss. The article was about the job of sports writer for a metropolitan newspaper and it opened with an account of an overnight journey from New York to a World's Series game in St. Louis. This was an eon or so ago, when Smith was a young man and I was a boy, and people travelled in sensible conveyances, such as railroad trains. The trip was a merry one, the activities including, among other things, much pleasurable and instructive chat. Smith didn't report the latter in any detail. But the point was that it was pleasurable and instructive and it lasted the whole night. Smith went on to say that sports writers are not paid much, in money, but that if you threw in the psychic income of pleasant afternoons in the sun and nights spent in the company of affable and intelligent eccentrics, they did pretty well.

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 1977 , pp. 3 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1977

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References

1 Smith, Red, “My Press Box Memoirs,” Esquire, 84 (October 1975).Google Scholar

2 I am obliged, however, to mention the contributions of Charles Tilly who, with creative flair, has conveyed French influence to American scholarship.

3 Clapham, J. H., “Economic History as a Discipline” in Seligman, Edwin R. A. and Johnson, Alvin, eds., Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, V (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 328.Google Scholar

4 See Hays, Samuel P., “History and Genealogy: Patterns of Change and Prospects for Cooperation”, Prologue, Spring, Summer, Fall 1975Google Scholar. My appreciation of the opportunities presented to economic historians by the work of genealogists has been enhanced by conversations with Virginia Pope Livingston, with whom I have had the good fortune to serve on the National Archives Advisory Council.

5 Lockridge, Kenneth A., Literacy in Colonial New England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974)Google Scholar. My intention here, and in subsequent references to the New Social History, is only to illustrate my points. It is not my intention to produce a comprehensive bibliographic essay.

6 Demos, John, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. xi.Google Scholar

7 Fishlow, Albert, “The New Economic History Revisited”, Journal of European Economic History, 3 (Fall 1974), 453–67.Google Scholar

8 Wood, Peter H., Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974)Google Scholar; Scott, Joan W., The Glassworkers of Carmaux (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

9 Lockridge, Kenneth A., A New England Town (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970)Google Scholar. The quantitative bases for this work are presented in a series of journal articles by Lockridge, which he then cites in the book.

10 Greven, Philip J., Four Generations: Population, Land and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

11 See, for example, Easterlin, Richard A., “Population Change and Farm Settlement in the Northern States”, Journal of Economic History, 36 (Mar. 1976), 45–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Easterlin mentions his debt to Greven. For an interesting effort to synthesize the work of the New Social and Economic Historians on early American history see Henretta, James A., The Evolution of American Society, 1700–1815 (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co., 1973).Google Scholar

12 Febvre, Lucien, A New Kind of History (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973), p. 31.Google Scholar