3 ms·

Doesn't history generally ignore the contributions of legions of lower class to any of man's great achievements?

AlotOfReading 6y ago
The kind of history you see on television and in general textbooks usually does. The omission has been recognized for a long time though, hence "social histories".
InitialLastName 6y ago
The goal of this whole series (and the last one, about bread) is to in some part rectify that demonstrating and explaining the economics of the process from a more labor-oriented perspective.
libraryofbabel 6y ago
To expand on others’ comments, popular history may still do this, but professional academic history got over that a long time ago. The subfield that deals with the experiences of ordinary people and “bottom-to-top” complete pictures of a society is called Social History. Social History is now over 60 years old (one of the most brilliant and influential books in this tradition, E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, is from 1963), and Social History has shaped the perspective of pretty much every professional historian writing in the last half century, whether they were for or against the key ideas. The intellectual debt is to (non-doctrinaire) Marxism, later supplemented with a health dose of anthropology (which led to the related field of cultural history). Basically the Social Historians more or less won, although the naive “great men great events” approach remained strong in popular history outside the academy. Social History was and is enormously influential among professional historians, probably the most influential intellectual shift in the history business in the last 100 years. (All people, everywhere, make history! A powerful message!) The author of this blog is a great practitioner of the social history tradition but it’s not a novel approach per se. That said, there should be more social history blogs! This blog regularly hits the front page of hacker news; people love this stuff!

The kind of history you see on television and in general textbooks usually does. The omission has been recognized for a long time though, hence "social histories".

InitialLastName 6y ago

The goal of this whole series (and the last one, about bread) is to in some part rectify that demonstrating and explaining the economics of the process from a more labor-oriented perspective.

libraryofbabel 6y ago

To expand on others’ comments, popular history may still do this, but professional academic history got over that a long time ago. The subfield that deals with the experiences of ordinary people and “bottom-to-top” complete pictures of a society is called Social History. Social History is now over 60 years old (one of the most brilliant and influential books in this tradition, E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, is from 1963), and Social History has shaped the perspective of pretty much every professional historian writing in the last half century, whether they were for or against the key ideas. The intellectual debt is to (non-doctrinaire) Marxism, later supplemented with a health dose of anthropology (which led to the related field of cultural history). Basically the Social Historians more or less won, although the naive “great men great events” approach remained strong in popular history outside the academy. Social History was and is enormously influential among professional historians, probably the most influential intellectual shift in the history business in the last 100 years. (All people, everywhere, make history! A powerful message!) The author of this blog is a great practitioner of the social history tradition but it’s not a novel approach per se. That said, there should be more social history blogs! This blog regularly hits the front page of hacker news; people love this stuff!