Quote:
Originally Posted by Turn Prophet
More common? More like exclusive. It's taken over 2000 years (in Western culture as a whole) to break free of the mostly Thucydidean paradigm of history = the State, war, diplomacy, and not much else. The decisions of the powerful were what defined "history." Regular people were not seen as contributing much to the process.
ding ding ding! I can't really say a defining moment where ''social histories'' started to pop up, somewhere around the 19th century they start to pop up more frequently. ''Marxian'' histories started poping up since the 19th century, before karl marx oddly enough - see the plethora of books called ''history of the dutch people, history of the french people...''
The major shift in history that came about in the 1960's are
a)carbon dating. This confirms that some society's were much older then expected.
b)a NEUTRAL point of view on religion. The 19th century histories were VERY anti-religious(Gibbon's&Michelet), while the previous one were very PRO religion. The 60's brought a very much needed neutrality on church. People started looking at religion as an influence, whether good or bad, but they did not see religion as the starting point of their culture(see african-american's)
c)Print culture and literacy starts to climb dramatically in what used to be illiterate social strata's.
d)The end of classical education as a whole - with more and more objects and techniques attributed to pre greco-roman culture, many social groups figured it's possible that their heritage is more then a tribal one.