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Tilly 1987 Family History Social History and Social Change

This document discusses challenges faced by social historians and family historians in studying large-scale social change. It argues that while the standard method of social history - collective biography - helps establish connections between individual lives and large processes, it sometimes suggests false connections. Family history can both illustrate these issues and directly contribute to the study of social change, but it also poses challenges like shifting from calendar timelines to identifying coherent social units and behaviors. The document examines these topics through several examples.

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51 views12 pages

Tilly 1987 Family History Social History and Social Change

This document discusses challenges faced by social historians and family historians in studying large-scale social change. It argues that while the standard method of social history - collective biography - helps establish connections between individual lives and large processes, it sometimes suggests false connections. Family history can both illustrate these issues and directly contribute to the study of social change, but it also poses challenges like shifting from calendar timelines to identifying coherent social units and behaviors. The document examines these topics through several examples.

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popeyedeptrai
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FAMILY HISTORY,

SOCIAL HISTORY,
AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Charles Tilly

ABSTRACT : The renewal of social history in the 1960s and thereafter challenged the
standard historical emphasis on explanation by motive, validation by motive-revealing
texts, and explication by narrative. Social historians divided, however, in their relative
emphasis on reconstitution of lives as people lived them and on the establishment of
connections between ordinary people’s behavior and large social processes such as
industrialization. The standard method of social history—collective biography—aids
the study of connections more than it aids reconstitution, although its uncritical use
often suggests false connections, and many borrowings from the social sciences lead to
erroneous analogies. Family history illustrates these points as an exemplar for the

study of large-scale social change, as a direct contribution to that study, and as a


challenge to its improvement. Among the challenges faced by family history and by
social history as a whole are (a) the shift of analyses from calendar time sequences, (b)
the identification of coherent social units, (c) the specification of regularities in the
behavior of those units. The article presents several examples of each point.

Charles Tilly teaches sociology and history, and


directs the Center for Studies of Social Change, at the
New School for Social Research. His most recent
books are Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge
Comparisons (1985), The Contentious French
(1986) and La France conteste (1986).
320
321
322
323
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329

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