That narrative can be more than a mechanical recitation of events is epitomized in Thucydides’ challenge to historiographical paradigms current during the fifth century B.C. In his definitive history of the war between Athens and Sparta, the Athenian general in effect tells a “story” with a beginning, middle, and end. Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War is anything but a neutral description of events. Instead, the collection interprets the conflict for the reader. The tale contains a discussion of the role of alternative military strategies and of the war’s wider political implications. According to Thucydides, the fractionization and polarization engendered by war as a mode of resolving political conflicts is too high a price to pay for victors and losers alike. Thucydides warns of psychic as well as material costs. Thus, the ancient political scientist tells the story of the Peloponnesian War to assert that the “sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama” (White 1987: 21).

Understanding the policy relevance of parties in the states has not been easy. Key (1949: 309–12) argued that parties that differed should pursue and enact different public policies. Studies have found sigificant differences between legislative parties (Jewell 1955; LeBlanc 1969). Indices of interparty competition have been constructed and their impact assessed on the assumption that high competition has a clear impact on policy. The results, however, have not supported that assumption. Interparty competition has generally shown little relationship to public policy levels (Dawson and Robinson 1963; Dye 1966; Tucker 1982; Garand 1988: 844).

This essay describes an oral history project that accompanied the establishment of an archive on the history of recent feminism in the region of Emilia-Romagna, Italy. The archive, which contains both written and oral historical sources, is now in existence at the library of the Bologna’s Women’s Center, the Centro di Documentazione delle Donne. Raffaella Lamberti (1989) has explained why it was politically important for the Women’s Center to establish such an archive. It should be noted that the Centro di Documentazione, since it was officially proposed in March 1982, has been a totally independent institution, although it draws financial and administrative support from the Regional Administration of Emilia-Romagna.

This article explores the role of social narratives in working-class formation. The primary goal of this exercise is to generate concepts for the comparative analysis of working-class identities and practices. My thesis is that more successful cases of working-class formation involve the elaboration of coherent narratives about individual and collective history, stories that are coordinated with one another and that are organized around the category of social class. In such narratives, events are selected for inclusion due to their relevance to social class, or they are excluded or deemphasized because of their irrelevance to class, and events are interpreted, emplotted, and evaluated in a way that emphasizes class rather than other possible constructs. By contrast, working-class formation is less pronounced where individual and collective narratives are based on alternative, nonclass forms of identity, such as nationality, gender, ethnicity, and race. Working-class formation is also weaker where individual narratives are asynchronous, where the individual and collective levels are not coordinated with one another, or where identities fail to attain narrative coherence.

Historical social science—which I understand to be analysis of change over time that is informed by the theories, methods, and questions of the social sciences—has in the past 25 or 30 years established itself as an important area of interdisciplinary study. It emerged at a point in time when, in the United States at least, several of the social science disciplines were dominated by positivist epistemologies and models drawn from the natural sciences. In practice, much of what has been understood as social science history has centered on the recovery and analysis of largely quantifiable sources that allowed the writing of the collective biography of large populations—the ordinary people arguably under-or unrepresented in classic historical accounts of previous eras. Drawing upon social-scientific traditions provided concepts and methodologies for analyzing processes that encompassed everyone, rather than merely the events dominated by an elite, and for studying relatively anonymous collectivities rather than merely the “great men.”