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The Transplanted: Workers, Class, and Labor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

James R. Barrett
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Extract

General history always requires an overall model, good or bad, against which events can be interpreted. ‘No theory, no history’ [Braudel, 1974: xi].

History is more complicated than theory [Vilar, 1982: 50, quoted in Zunz, 1985: 74].

Psychologists tell us that everyone is a bit neurotic. Academics may be a bit more neurotic than most people. When our work is going well, we get suspicious or at the very least we get anxious, always looking for new heights to scale. Part of the recent intellectual turbulence in the field of social history and in my own field of labor history, I would argue, is self-induced. We did not have enough problems, stuffing the lives of thousands of discrete individuals into our codebooks, reading everything that has ever been written about the work habits of iron moulders, plotting on maps the locations of saloons and cafes in relation to immigrant workers’ homes and then trying to make some sense out of all that. What we needed was a crisis. Like all good scholarly crises, what the crisis in social history is depends upon whom you ask, but if nothing else, the phenomenon gives us all just what we needed—something new to worry about.

Type
Comment and Debate: John Bodnar’s The Transplanted: A Roundtable
Information
Social Science History , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , Fall 1988 , pp. 221 - 231
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1988 

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