The History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter

Abstract

By the mid-1990s, as cultural history won the field from social history, Alltagsgeschichte—the history of everyday life that emerged in 1980s West Germany— seemed a minor casualty along the way. The doyen of German social historians, Hans Ulrich Wehler, offered an unsentimental obituary: “It has been clear for some time that the ‘history of everyday life’ (Alltagsgeschichte) has been a failure, theoretically speaking. All of the smart people have moved on to the New Cultural History. This development also will take its course in America, where currently students of those historians who once declared themselves enthusiastically for the history of everyday life are fighting a rearguard battle.”1 The reports of Alltagsgeschichte’s death, however, have been greatly exaggerated. The history of everyday life played an important role in shaping the future of German historiography in North America. In this article, we wish to suggest several fruitful ways in which future scholarship may use Alltagsgeschichte, particularly in the transplanted form that has taken root on the American side of the Atlantic Ocean, to integrate social and cultural history into what might be called a self-critical history of the present.2 Alltagsgeschichte grew in 1970s West Germany from decidedly international roots, not least from E. P. Thompson’s efforts to “rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.”3 Like its politically charged cousins in Britain, Alltagsgeschichte