Social Science History Association Research Articles

Labour History at the Twenty-Second Meeting of the Social Science History Association

Labour History at the Twenty-Second Meeting of the Social Science History Association

The social history of Jews in the Holocaust: the necessity of interviewing survivors

This essay urges the importance of collecting the oral history of survivors in order to create a richer and more accurate social history of Jews during the Holocaust. The special circumstances of the Holocaust have resulted in a documentary history which has been told from the perspective of the Nazi perpetrators. Only oral testimony can enable us to understand the actions and reactions of Jews faced with harassment, expropriation, exile, and murder. The practice of oral history was not originally designed for eliciting memories of traumatic events. Holocaust oral history requires the historian to reject the positivist conception of the objective and distanced interviewer, in favor of a position as compassionate listener to painful personal experiences. Interviews can produce less mediated, more spontaneous versions of memory, which require sensitive interpretation. The oral histories of Jewish refugees to Shanghai are examined to demonstrate how careful reading and listening can elucidate the social memories, and thus the social history, of Jews in the Holocaust. The process of interviewing also helps the historian bridge the experiential gap with survivors, enabling a better understanding of their experiences. What do you want me to do? I haven't prepared for this, I haven't thought about it, I must say, because we've been very swamped in recent days. I'm the department chairman now and I've been swamped with administrative problems, financial among others. So I haven't thought about it, let me try to focus. Maybe you can say a few words to help me to focus.1 * Address all communications to Steve Hochstadt, Bates College, Lewiston, ME 04240 USA, shochsta@bates.edu. Written for presentation at the Social Science History Association annual meeting, panel on Using Oral Histories to Study the Holocaust, New Orleans, October 10, 1996, and subsequently revised. A somewhat different version is being published in Sino-Judaica, v. 3 (Sino-Judaic Institute: 1997).

A good time to wed?: marriage and economic distress in England and Wales, 1839-1914

The analysis of the statistics of marriage drawn from the Registrar General's annual reports forms part of research on the origins of the depressed areas of Britain financed by the Leverhulme Trust. The analysis of the Bolton parish register was supported by a Small Personal Research Grant from the British Academy. Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Social Science History Association, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, the Liverpool University Institute for European Population Studies, and the All Souls Quantitative Economic History Workshop. We are particularly grateful to Tim Hatton, Paul Johnson, Roger Schoneld, and David Vincent for their help and suggestions.

Social Networks and Social Science History

The title of this presidential address reflects the happy conjunction of my particular interest in social networks and the network structure of the Social Science History Association. My talk will be brief, because I want to reserve most of this “presidential picnic” for the panel that the program chair, Donna Gabaccia, organized. Last year's president, Eric Monkkonen (1994: 166), in his history of the institution of the SSHA, called our meetings “a venue for scholars from different disciplines to learn to talk to one another.” That we have this annual opportunity for conversations is due to the work of our networks that organize the sessions that attract us to the meetings; to program chairs—this year, Donna—who create a program from these sessions; and to our executive director, Erik Austin, whose ability and diligence keeps the organization going from year to year.

Labor History at the Social Science History Association

Labor History at the Social Science History Association

Lessons of Social Science History

I am pleased to be able to address this, the eighteenth annual meeting of the Social Science History Association. I have many valued memories of presidential addresses, but my favorite was Jerry Clubb’s 1984 talk in the Chinese restaurant in Toronto, where speakers, waiters, and many other patrons all competed in a cacophonic, noisy free-for-all. Jerry did not even try to finish the talk, so we had to wait until it appeared in the journal (Clubb 1986).

Lessons of social science history

I am pleased to be able to address this, the eighteenth annual meeting of the Social Science History Association. I have many valued memories of presidential addresses, but my favorite was Jerry Clubb's 1984 talk in the Chinese restaurant in Toronto, where speakers, waiters, and many other patrons all competed in a cacophonic, noisy free-for-all. Jerry did not even try to finish the talk, so we had to wait until it appeared in the journal (Clubb 1986). This memory perhaps is followed by the first official meeting in 1976, when the

Introduction: Narratives and Social Identities

THIS ISSUE of Social Science History inaugurates a series of five articles, to be published over the next few issues, on the subject of narrative and the formation of social identities. The series originated in a session of the November 1989 Social Science History Association meetings in Washington, DC. That session included an early version of the article by George Steinmetz, published here, in addition to papers by Kathleen Canning (1992), Janet Hart, and Margaret Somers. The session inspired such enthusiastic interest and vigorous discussion that Ron Aminzade, now an editor of Social Science History but then an ordinary citizen, proposed that we think about collecting these papers in a special edition of the association's journal. Since then, two other articles, by Mary Jo Maynes (in this issue) and Luisa Passerini (to be published later), have been added to the set.

Testimony by Warren E. Miller Before the N.S.F. Biological and Behavioral Science Task Force on Reorganization, November 29, 1990

Political science and other closely related social science disciplines could certainly benefit from the creation of a Directorate for the Social and Behavioral Sciences within the National Science Foundation. I present the case for such organizational restructuring on behalf of the American Political Science Association and the Western Political Science Association, and as a charter member and former President of the Social Science History Association. That a benefit would accrue from a reorganization would seem likely in the face of two organizational imperatives. First, political science and its sister disciplines need direct representation by senior officers of their own directorate in the policy making and resource allocation of at least three additional existing directorates: the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, and the Directorate for Scientific, Technological and International Affairs. The needs of political science in these three domains are similar to those of the other social sciences and are distinctly different from the needs of either the life sciences, the geosciences or the mathematical and physical sciences. Social science needs will not, and most likely cannot, be articulated by Foundation officers whose organizational responsibilities are overwhelmingly defined by the needs -and current resources-of the biosciences and whose professional backgrounds lie in one of the biosciences. We believe that the manifold resources of the Foundationprofessional and technical as well as budgetary-have not successfully addressed the needs of the social sciences in large part because the social sciences are not directly represented at the appropriate organizational level within the Foundation. The second organizational imperative stems from the need for greater organizational differentiation within the social sciences. Even though few of the social and behavioral science disciplines are as diverse as the array of subfields in chemistry or its sister disciplines, the full panoply of research specialties across the several social sciences is on a par with the diversity represented in the other substantive directorates. Many of the existing activities of the present Division of Social and Economic Science could be relocated as divisions of the new directorate. For example, without attempting to provide an organizational blueprint for the future, it may be suggested that, as with the other substantive directorates, each of the present disciplinary programs in S.E.S. might well be a division within a Social and Behavioral Science Directorate. They might be joined by a Division of Methods, Measurement and Instrumentation needed to address those problems of data generation and analysis that the disciplinary divisions have in common. Similarly, there should also be a separate division for large-scale multi-purpose data collection and resource development. A quite new division might also be established for activities centered on increasing the scientific usefulness of data generated by governmental agencies. Finally, and still illustratively, a separate division might be created for multi-disciplinary or multi-institutional projects or programs. To give greater clarity to the foregoing prescriptions, consider the following. First, with regard to representing social science needs in other directorates, the computer has become as central-and totally indispensable-to the work ways of social science as to the other sciences. And yet the central tasks for the computer are somewhat different. Certainly in contrast to mathematics, social science does much more data management of numeric data, more archiving and retrieval of non-quantitative materials, and much less sheer computation. On a quite different dimension, social science has its own version of the adaptation of the computer to data generation. In the harnessing of the computer in Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing, in improving methods of textual analysis, and in the use of the lap top computer for data collection in the field (and quite apart from use in simulation exercises), we are only beginning to exploit fully this technological wonder. As a third illustration, it can be noted that in the absence of large laboratories or research centers which bring together scientists working on common problems, the computer network is becoming an essential feature of the social scientist's life. Both the transmission of data by computer nets and inter-personal exchanges among scientists are probably more crucial for the maturing social sciences than for the more developed disciplines. Many of these and other needs of the social scientist are served indirectly and inadvertently by computer developments in other realms. However, without a new directorate in the Foundation, it seems unrealistic if not unreasonable to expect strong and direct representation of social science computing needs that should affect future Foundation policy and resource allocation. A separate Directorate for the Social and Behavioral Sciences is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition to have an impact on Foundation decisions concerning the development of computer and information science.

Introduction: Forum on American Domestic Service

The articles on American domestic service that appear in this issue of Social Science History were part of a 1989 Social Science History Association Annual Meeting session. They reveal that, despite the investigations of Katzman (1978), Sutherland (1981), Dudden (1983), Glenn (1986), and others, there is still a great deal to know about domestic service in the United States. Each article offers a different perspective on transformations within domestic service in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and provides new information about different demographic categories of domestic servants. Taken together, they suggest creative new ways of understanding the occupation and its relationship to race, ethnicity, gender, and the industrial labor market.

Seeing Beyond Culture

The centerpiece essay began as a brief paper for a Social Science History Association session, chaired by Robert Swierenga, on connecting ecology to rural history; only later, at the request of this journal's editor, did I try to expand it into a broader statement on environmental history, and then I never intended to make it a definitive survey or a critique of my colleagues. My purpose was merely to indicate some of the big doors environmental historians ought to be opening, although I did immodestly tend to point most strenuously to those doors leading to my own recent work on the nature-agriculture connection. Now with these excellent commentaries included, the field is indeed more adequately characterized, and it should be far more obvious why it is stirring up so much excitement. There are many fundamental, and huge, questions being asked, and they are questions that ought to interest all historians. A decade or two ago, when environmental history was just beginning to take form, all the prominent scholars were writing histories of environmental policy, ideas of nature, and conservation reform. They gave us many stimulating works, but I felt the field was starting off too intellectualistically, too homocentrically, and that it needed to locate some clear, distinct ground of its own; otherwise, the new field would never be able to claim an identity of its own, never expand our understanding of causality beyond human agency, never really challenge the ethical imagination of our time. Since then each of the authors in this round table has helped correct those deficiencies by bringing in the world of nature as an active agent in shaping the past. Each has at the same time managed pretty well to integrate the ideal with the material. Unlike William Cronon, I don't think we have overlooked or neglected the role of ideas; for example, his book, Changes in the Land, offers a superb analysis of economic ideas, notions of property, and the commodification of the environment in early New England.1 All of us have made the point that there are and always have been physical limitations and ecological constraints on society; I would single out that insight as the most important one we have to offer. Now, however, what I sense stirring in a few of these replies is nostalgia for that old narrow focus on the self-referential history of human ideas, society, and culture, with its tendency to dismiss nature as a mere epiphenomenon. Cronon's main complaint seems to be that my doorway into environmental history is too constricted in its materialistic emphasis on the idea of modes of produc-

The State of Social Science History in the Late 1980s

Is social science history a dated fad, or has it been so fully accepted as to have become uncontroversial? Is it more or less popular with professors and graduate students today than in the recent past? Is its status higher at the most prestigious universities, or among their graduates, than at less highly ranked colleges? What do historians and other social scientists see as the strengths and weaknesses, the achievements and deficiencies of social science history (ssh)? To what degree do more traditional historians agree or disagree with social scientific historians and historically oriented social scientists about these matters? How widespread is the teaching of statistics and theory in history departments, and how sophisticated is it, compared with the offerings in social science departments? Has the field become truly interdisciplinary? To gauge opinion and gather facts on these and other topics, I sent out 456 questionnaires in May 1987 to individuals in three groups: historians who were members of the Social Science History Association (SSHA), nonhistorian SSHA members, and one non-SSHA member at each of the universities listed in the American Historical Association's Guide to Departments of History that claimed to offer Ph.D. programs. The response, partially stimulated by a reminder to those who did not reply within six weeks, was gratifyingly high: 105 SSHA historians, 101 SSHA members whose self-described primary departmental affiliation was not with a history department, and 98 non-SSHA historians returned at least partially completed questionnaires. Not only was the overall response rate of two-thirds respectable for a mail survey, but many people wrote useful and interesting comments in the margins, as I had invited them to, while others enclosed innovative syllabi or reflections on the subject. A copy of the questionnaire with the responses of the three groups to each question indicated appears as an appendix to this paper, and readers may wish to refer to it for the exact wording of questions and the precise numbers who answered each way. The non-SSHA group received only Part I of the survey, while the SSHA sample got both parts.

Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association

America. She stressed the importance of placing women's migration in the context of and economic conditions. Seeking to maximize their families' economic positions, migrated under different circumstances. Decisions to migrate were shaped by labor force segregation in the destination cities, and by the possible existence of kin or ethnic networks. Women's roles and obligations were the key determinants of their migration decisions. Louise Tilly (New School for Social Research) urged a sensitivity to the difficulty in using identity as a category in historical analysis and suggested that the emerging working-class culture dis cussed by Locke applied to at only one point in their life cycles. She also pointed out that varied places of origin may have had a dramatic effect on the experiences of migrant women. In her comments, Donna Gabaccia (Mercy College) stressed the importance of tying together women adrift and family economy approaches to the experiences of working-class women. She suggested that economic and cultural conditions are difficult to separate when studying immigrant and recommended a comparative approach to the history of female migration. These sessions revealed the need to approach working-class life with a sensitivity to the many factors mediating class experience. The sessions borrowed analytic insights from other disciplines to make sense out of working-class experiences, stepping outside rigid definitions of labor history and narrow concep tions of class. These labor historians benefit from analyses of race, gender, ethnicity, culture, and politics. Yet the various sessions were seldom talking to one another. These varied and useful approaches have eroded the unity of labor history and, while all would agree that something links the experiences of working-class people, it is difficult to blend the diverging approaches into a comprehensive understanding of working-class experience. While these papers offer rich analyses of worker life and protest, they lack an adequate theoretical tie, making sense out of what makes these different cases part of the same history, labor history.

Labor and Industrialization Meeting of the Social Science History Association

Labor and Industrialization Meeting of the Social Science History Association

Great Expectations and Secular Depreciation: The First Ten Years of the Social Science History Association

The idea of forming a new scholarly association has been generated in the lonely study of scholars hungry for supportive contact, in the interaction of kindred seekers in convention bars or bull sessions, and no doubt, in many other kinds of circumstances. The Social Science History Association began as an exercise in transmogrification, and although, in retrospect, its origin may appear to have been an act of secession, it was not intended as such. Institutional manifestation of what came to be called the “New Political History” was apparent as early as 1957 when a small group of historians interested in the political history of the American early national period met at Rutgers under the sponsorship of the Social Science Research Council to discuss the methodology of political history. The draft report of that conference, prepared by Richard P. McCormick (1957), rather accurately forecast significant developments during the next decade.

Social History and Historical Sociology: Contrasts and Complementarities

Over the ten years of its existence, the Social Science History Association has been a meeting place for groups in rebellion against the dominant orthodoxies of their disciplines. Thus it is fitting that an SSHA panel should assess the accomplishments and relationship of “social history” and “historical sociology,” two movements that have grown up as critiques of formerly dominant orientations in (respectively) the disciplines of history and sociology.

Great Expectations and Secular Depreciation: The First Ten Years of the Social Science History Association

Great Expectations and Secular Depreciation: The First Ten Years of the Social Science History Association

Developing the History of Congress: A Report

AbstractOn Friday, November 22, 1985, the Social Science History Association sponsored a session at its annual convention, Developing the History of Congress. A panel consisting of Allan R. Bogue, University of Wisconsin; Joel H. Silbey, Cornell University; David W. Brady, Rice University; and Aage R. Clausen, Ohio State University; chaired by Congress & the Presidency Associate Editor Michael Les Benedict, initiated a general discussion on research in the history of Congress and what might be done to promote historical study of the Legislative Branch. A report on the panel presentations and discussion is followed by the comments of Professors Bogue and Silbey.

Social science history association—1986 meeting: Calls for papers

Social science history association—1986 meeting: Calls for papers

The Revivalism of Narrative: A Response to Recent Criticisms of Quantitative History

In his presidential address to the Social Science History Association Convention in November 1981, Robert William Fogel declared sanguinely that social scientific historians had won their battle for legitimacy within the historical profession in America, and that we should now stop feeling embattled, spend less effort proselytizing, and calmly go on with our substantive work. While his statistics on the occupational advancement of social scientific historians do indicate a degree of acceptance, and while his advice to worry less and pay attention to business will be followed (as that is what nearly all of us were doing anyway), I am less optimistic than Fogel, read the employment trends differently, and see more signs of a reaction against quantitative social scientific history-or what I like to refer to as QUASSH-than he does (Kousser, 1980). Perhaps Professor Fogel and I differ only temperamentally. As a former Marxist, he still retains a bit of faith in the inevitable triumph of progressive forces; as a former Methodist, I am unable to shake off the pessimism that is the psychological residue of the doctrine of original sin. In any case, whereas Fogel seems to think that most recent criticisms of QUASSH are so obviously flawed as to require no answer, I fear that some people, especially those with substantial investments in history-as-it-used-to-be-done, may still be susceptible to false messiahs or, perhaps more precisely, false Jeremiahs.