American Social History

“Social History” is a course title that often throws people at first. When I tell people that I teach it, they give me a look of puzzlement. History of parties? History of etiquette? History of friendship? Well, no.

So I have gotten into the habit of saying that “social history is the history of non-famous people.” That’s as good a starting definition as any. The subdiscipline of social history arose, in part, as an explicitly political effort to counteract Great Men histories–which were based on certain kinds of historical sources, often self-consciously created for posterity by literate elites higher on the social class ladder, and usually taking certain narrative tropes as their template (victory, settlement, founding, conquering, subduing – etc). In contrast, social history seeks to recover, reconstitute, or create a past more fully peopled by ALL the folks who lived there – including folks who were not powerful, literate, male, white, wealthy, victorious or settled. While the scholarship of social historians has filtered into textbooks and throughout the field more generally over the last three decades, most people probably still misconstrue US history as a series of presidents, grand “events,” and notable people. Hopefully you will never think of it that way again after taking this course.

Our semester is organized into three large units, each taking a slightly different perspective on the American past. In the first unit, we look at American social history as the history of workers, work, and labor. In the second, we consider American social history as women’s history, and in the third, American social history as the history of a polyglot multicultural nation – usually shorthanded as a “majority” and various “minorities” or cast as a “nation of immigrants,” but actually much more rich and complex than such oversimplifications imply.

I last taught this course in the Spring of 2009, and so the older entries on this website are from that semester; I am leaving them in place as a reference for those students. All the previous term’s material has been tagged “Spr09,” and you can safely ignore it, since I will re-post new information for the Spring 2011 term as we go along.

This website is the “Grand Central Station” for the course. Bookmark it and/or subscribe to its RSS feed (click on the little RSS icon in the sidebar). I’ve also created a public Google calendar for the course and its assignments; if you use Google calendar yourself (and I highly recommend that you do), simply add the course calendar to your own by clicking on the icon in the lower right corner. It can also be viewed on the “Schedule” tab.