Sources of social history

1. SOCIAL HISTORY
Ram Proshad Barman
Lecturer
Department of sociology
Begum Rokeya University, Rangpur
Bangladesh
Email;:proshadram2400@gmail.Com

2. SOURCES OF SOCIAL HISTORY
o Sources produced by government or administrative agencies, broadly defined
o Nongovernmental sources or those created by private groups and individuals, including
businesses;
o Researcher-generated sources, including interviews and oral histories; and
o Nonwritten sources and artifacts

3. NATURE OF SOCIAL HISTORY
• Emerged as a field in the mid 19th century as a reaction to older fields-political,
diplomatic history
• The history of great men and great ideas—that, in their focus on elites, failed to
address the historical experiences of the vast majority of the human population
• Social historians, committed to understanding the lives of ordinary people, have
faced particular challenges locating sources
• Across time, most non-elites have had little access to the written word; most of
the textual sources that do yield information about them were created by those
who governed or employed them. Rather than being discouraged by these
challenges, social historians have responded creatively, turning to quantitative
data, material and visual culture, the built environment, and oral histories to
supplement more traditional archival and printed sources.

4. Nature of social history
• Grasping the possibilities and constraints faced by people in the past
inevitably entails grappling with the dynamics of categorization,
consciousness, and mobilization
• The field of social history therefore intersects with the study of
families, childhood, gender, race, labor, religion, crime, poverty,
health, and disability (to name only a few themes). Parallels in our
preoccupations
• Various sources also lead social historians to be in frequent dialogue
with scholarship in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology,
geography and archaeology.

5. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HISTORY AND SOCIAL HISTORY
• History is broad and allowing us to experience
different field of history
• Being able to find out what areas , types,
approaches we are more interested and involves
interpreting events from different approaches
• It’s a good option if we are interested to study all
aspects of history
• A historian always applies variety of ways to
analyze events
• It is the study of ‘’big people and events’’ in the
past
• Connection between history and social history is
comparatively interrelated
• Social history is more specialized and about societal
experience
• Helps us to look historical events in social context
• Its better to study society, events related to social
phenomenon
• Often social historian analyze events in a social
Interest
• It considers only how the ‘’regular’’ people lived,
worked and existed
• Social history is basically the lens of history in terms
of social conscience

6. CIVILIZATION
• Generally, civilization is used to indicate a high state of progress, a
certain level of social, cultural, political, economic and technological
evolution that differentiates us from early cultures
• As well as current primitive communities that stay more or less
isolated from what we call the modern world
• We must take into account that the word civilization can be also used
in a broader sense: to denote the set of ideas, knowledge, values,
institutions and achievements of a society at a certain time.
• Archaeological record demonstrates that early humans practiced
nomadism for many thousands of years and had a simple —though
not easy— life as hunter-gatherers.

7. Civilization: John Anthony west
• A society organized upon the conviction that mankind is on earth for
a purpose
• We are concerned with the quality of the inner life rather than with
the conditions of day to day existence

8. CIVILIZATION
• However, at the end of the last Ice Age (circa 10,000 BC) a radical
change occurred and the human population entered a stage of
progressive settlement that altered their strategy for survival: in
addition to hunting and gathering, men began to domesticate plants
and animals, thus becoming farmers and shepherds.
• Archeologist Gordon V. Childe called this process the “Neolithic
Revolution”. And, between 4000 and 3000 BC, after a few millennia of
Neolithic communities which had been developing in several areas of
the world, the first known civilizations appeared, first in Mesopotamia
and soon after in Egypt. Some centuries later, civilization emerged
strongly in other parts of the world: the Indus Valley, China and finally
the New World.

9. This new breakthrough, the so called “Urban Revolution”, was
characterized by several milestones:
• Population was divided into small rural villages and large settlements which
eventually became cities.
• A centralized religious-political power grew in the cities, achieving control over
vast areas and thus creating the first state structures. Administrative apparatus
and legal doctrines were created as a support for these structures.
• The surplus of resources promoted growth and economic exchange, leading to
the development of trade.
• Society was stratified in several levels; there was a progressive specialization of
work, especially in the urban environment.
• Systems of writing appeared as a means of recording and managing information
(a factor that eventually led to the creation of predominant historical cultures).
• There was significant progress in science and technique in general, particularly in
terms of practical application. An important material culture was developed in
various arts and industries.

10. CRITICISM
• we consider civilization as a set of values, knowledge, beliefs or products of a
society, it is clear that the present world is really very complex and
sometimes incomprehensible to the average citizen who has no idea of the
final destination of human development.
• The modern civilized world looks like an astounding technological façade
with no values or spirit behind it, except the materialist motivations.
• In this context, a growing sense of apathy and bewilderment seizes modern
society
• We cannot understand why one day we are fortunate and the next we have
nothing, while many people grow up having nothing at all, not even hope.
The multiple forms of corruption only increase this feeling of astonishment
and indignation.

11. IMPORTANCES OF SOCIAL HISTORY
meant a sense in which we live
• Where do you live?
• Who do they live with ?
• How did they come to live there ?
• Where did they grow up?
• What sort of work do they do?
• How much school have they completed?
• What do they do for fun?
• What are the important relationship in
their lives?
• How did they develop?
• Why do they fail to gain desires?
• Earth, social status, materialistic, happiness, civilized, modern
• Smart, traditional, developed, underdeveloped, conflictual, simple,
common
• Transportation, technology, education, intelligence
• Eastern, Western, Africa, Asia
• Agriculture, religion, business, trade, mobile technology
• Graduation, post graduation, secondary, high school etc.
• Entertainment, problem solution, movie ,theatre
• Solidarity, money, loneliness, independence, safety
• Mechanism , industry, war, weapon, population, resources
• Barriers, complexity, domination, exploitation, lack of devotion

12. HISTORIOGRAPHY
• Study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic
discipline
• Covers how historians have studied that topic using particular sources,
techniques, approaches i.e. historiography of UK, Canada
• Beginning in the 19th century there developed a body of historiographic
literature
• In the early modern period historiography meant the writing of history and
historiographer meant historian
• In the present century ‘’the study of the way history has ben and is written’’
• When you study historiography you don’t study the events of the past
directly, but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of
individual historians

13. ANTIQUITY
• No historical writers in the early civilizations were known by name
including Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt
• The term "historiography" is taken to refer to written history recorded
in a narrative format for the purpose of informing future generations
about events. In this limited sense, "ancient history" begins with the
early historiography of Classical Antiquity, in about the 5th century
BCE.