Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T19:38:07.416Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Quantitative History and People’s History: Two Methods in Conflict?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Roderick Floud
Roderick Floud*
Affiliation:
University of London
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It was fashionable some years ago for historians to speak of the quantitative revolution in their subject and to look forward, either with hope or with foreboding, to the day when history, like geography, sociology, and other social sciences before it, would be dominated by practitioners skilled in quantitative methods. New questions would be asked, new methods used, new sources exploited, and new discoveries made. In the process, those historians without training in quantitative methods would be swept from the battlegrounds of the subject. They would be forced to retreat either into the antiquarianism within which many quantitative historians, privately, located them or they would be forced to undergo a painful process of retooling in a struggle to avoid technological obsolescence. It was a reasonable expectation in those days that a statistical training would become as essential to a historian as a training in foreign languages or experience in burrowing for sources in the record office: As Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie put it in 1968, by the 1980s “the historian will be a programmer or he will be nothing” (Le Roy Ladurie, 1968). As a result, quantitative historians gathering in the early 1970s thought that the quantitative revolution would be largely complete as the world entered the 1980s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Spring 1984 , pp. 151 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1984 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Berdahl, R. [ed.] (1982) Klassen und Kultur. Sozialanthropologische Perspektiven in der Geschichtsschreibung. Frankfurt: Syndikat.Google Scholar
Beringer, R. E. (1978) Historical Analysis. New York: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Cannadine, D. (1982) “Thoughts on the new economic history.” London Rev. of Books 4: 15.Google Scholar
Editorial Collective (1977) “Editorial.” History Workshop 3: 1.Google Scholar
Floud, R. (1973) Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Historians. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Fogel, R. W. (1981) “Circumstantial evidence in ‘scientific’ and traditional history.” Working Paper. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Foster, J. (1974) Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.Google Scholar
Fox-Genovese, E. and Genovese, E. (1976) “The political crisis of social history: a Marxian perspective.” J. of Social History 10: 211.Google Scholar
Henkel, M. and Taubert, R. (1979) Maschinenstürmer. Ein Kapitel aus der Sozialgeschichte des technischen Fortschritts. Frankfurt: Syndikat.Google Scholar
Johnson, R. (1978) “Edward Thompson, Eugene Genovese, and socialist humanist history.” History Workshop 6: 79–100.Google Scholar
Judt, T. (1979) “A clown in regal purple: social history and the historians.” History Workshop 7: 71–79.Google Scholar
Kocka, J. (1980) “Theory and social history: recent developments in West Germany.” Social Research 47: 446.Google Scholar
Kousser, J. M. (1980) “History QUASSHed, 1957-1980.” Social Science Working Paper 309. Pasadena: California Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Kousser, J. M. (1979) “Quantitative Social Science History.” Social Science Working Paper 272. Pasadena: California Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Le Roy Ladurie, E. (1968) Le Territoire de l’Historien. Paris: Gallimard. (Translated in 1979 as The Territory of the Historian. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.)Google Scholar
Loewenberg, P. (1971) “The psycho-historical origins of the Nazi youth cohort.” Amer. Historical Rev. 76: 1475.Google Scholar
Mccloskey, D. N. (1971) Essays on a Mature Economy. New York and Princeton, NJ: Methuen and Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Poirier, D. J. (1977) “Econometric methodology in radical economics.” Ameri. Economic Rev. 67: 393–399.Google Scholar
Samuel, R. [ed.] (1981a) People’s History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Samuel, R. (1981b) East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Samuel, R. [ed.] (1977a) Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Samuel, R. (1977b) “The workshop of the world: steam power and hand technology in mid-Victorian Britain.” History Workshop 3: 14–15.Google Scholar
Samuel, R. (1976) “Local history and oral history.” History Workshop 1: 204.Google Scholar
Samuel, R. [ed.] (1975) Village Life and Labour. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Selbourne, D. (1980) “On the methods of History Workshop.” History Workshop 8: 150–161.Google Scholar
Stone, L. (1979) “The revival of narrative: reflections on a new old history.” Past and Present 85: 13.Google Scholar
White, J. (1980) Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887-1920. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Wright, E. O. (1979) Class Structure and Income Determination. New York. Academic Press.Google Scholar