The new and newer Histories: Social theory and historiography in an American key

Abstract

During the twentieth century a series of ‘new histories’ constructed an alliance with the social sciences to revise and revitalize the practice of history in Europe and the United States. This essay analyzes the ways American historians have made use of social theory and compares that usage with the Annales school. For American historians, as for Europeans, social theory helped to stabilize an increasingly uncertain narrative of Western history by analysis of the structures beneath and forces within the course of political events. The story moves from the New History of the Progressive Era to the more structural 1950s alliance with the social sciences, to some of the newer histories that alliance spawned (social science history, histories of modernization, and the social‐cultural history of the dispossessed), and ends with the newest theoretical turn to postmodern literary and cultural theories aimed not at stabilizing, but destabilizing, the narrative of Western history.