Was there a ‘Bielefeld School of History’? The Project of the New Social History in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

On the basis of unpublished sources, this essay investigates whether between the 1970s and 1980s the group of social historians at Bielefeld University can be considered as a historiographic school. Were the methodological premises, the historiographical practices as well as the scientific production sufficiently distinctive, uniform and influential to talk about a “Bielefeld School“of History? Rather, this case study shows the ways and forms of the international establishment of a specific academic milieu consisting in a cohesive, but not homogeneous network that shared a similar methodological premise, a thematic focus on society and sought to establish the Historische Sozialwissenschaft as a renewal of West German historical science in the field of historians through joint action.