THE SOURCES OF SOCIAL HISTORY

Mary Lindemann

Social historians exploit a variety of archival, manuscript, literary, and nonwritten sources. Indeed almost every historical source is grist for the social historical mill, thus a survey of the sources of social history must always be incomplete. Enterprising social historians over the decades have unearthed many new documentary treasures and devised novel ways of using old sources. This brief survey concentrates, therefore, only on the most common ways social historians have employed sources.

QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE SOURCES

An old but still functional distinction is that separating quantitative and qualitative information. Social historians who use principally quantitative materials apply the methods of the social sciences, in particular sociology, political science, statistics, and demography, to history, thereby writing social science history. Quantitative sources are generally those that allow historians to count or those that historians can analyze statistically. Historians who mine them work with large collections of data, frequently laboring in teams and using computers to correlate, aggregate, and evaluate the data accumulated. Many historians focus on discerning broad structural shifts and documenting secular, that is, century-long, changes. Their sources are habitually those generated by governments, for instance, censuses and tax lists, as well as parish records, price and wage data, hospital ledgers, and property deeds. These historians practice what they like to characterize as "history from the bottom up" and "history with the politics left out." Such scholars—as, for instance, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie on the peasants of Languedoc, Georges Duby on medieval rural life, and David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber on Tuscans and their families—have typically dealt with masses of people and are concerned mostly with uncovering the structural forces affecting or even determining people's lives.

One type of social history prefers what might be called qualitative sources, those that are either not quantifiable or that do not lend themselves easily or readily to quantification. Such were the sources of the "old" social history and of the narrative history that related the stories of entire peoples or whole groups. These authors usually based their judgments on the evidence in elite writings, novels, and other prose forms. Thomas Babington Macaulay's splendid, multivolumed History of England from the Accession of James II (1849–1861) and Jules Michelet's The People (1846) are classic examples.

Those historians who instead looked for the hidden mainsprings of history and searched for broader structures criticized "older" histories as impressionistic. Whether these dissenters were historians working in the Annales paradigm or were those driven by "grand social theories," that is, the metahistorical narratives proposed by Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Georg Simmel, they accepted the existence and action of major determinant processes in history and rejected analyses based on the influences of "great men" and "great ideas." This caused a turn to quantifiable sources as well as a search for what the Annales historian Fernand Braudel called the longue durée (long time frame). These scholars typically evinced a passionate curiosity about people, including peasants, women, the poor, transients, and heretics, often neglected by old-fashioned historians and traditional histories that highlighted political, intellectual, and diplomatic matters. In addition some, again like Braudel, suggested that the methods of geography and geology and their sources, such as measuring tree rings to determine climatic change or, as Georges Duby and others attempted, a minute analysis of field patterns to determine modifications in agricultural practices, had to be brought to bear on the historical experience.

The search for structures that lay deeply embedded in the society required attention to large sets of data. Some of these sources had been employed previously. Economic historians, for example, had estimated long-term adjustments in prices and wages and located movements in standards of living. Still, not everyone was satisfied with detecting and examining structures. Others were displeased with the fastidious and sometimes boring or clumsy prose style quantifiers preferred. These scholars called for a return to narrative as Lawrence Stone proposed in The Past and the Present (1981).

Moreover macrohistorical movements or grand structures seemed to rob people of their agency in shaping history and denied them their own choices in life. Structural history has an unfortunate tendency to place people in socioeconomic "boxes," where their actions were constrained if not dictated by huge impersonal forces that they could not perceive, control, or evade. Individual agency was lost, as was the political part of human experience. In reaction, some historians insisted, for instance, that knowing the sizes of families or households—understanding perhaps that one family type, described by John Hajnal, had persisted since the late Middle Ages—revealed little about what "went on" in those units. High levels of infant mortality might be interpreted as demonstrating that families invested hardly anything either materially or emotionally into very young children and that little true affection existed in families produced by marriages arranged by parents who based their decisions primarily on economic considerations. To discuss feelings and emotions, historians consulted other sources, including "ego-documents," court rolls, administrative records, diaries, letters, and prescriptive literature like advice manuals.

Of course the division between quantitative "lumpers" on the one hand and qualitative "feelers" on the other is artificial, as is the split between those who supposedly look only for structures and those who prefer to stress the ability of individuals to manipulate their own situations. Rarely do "pure" types of any exist. Quantitative historians often turn to qualitative sources if only for illustrations. Historians who prefer qualitative or anecdotal materials always have been plagued by nagging questions of typicality, and few ignore the possibilities of counting when and where they can. Many historians have gracefully combined the two types of sources to great benefit, as, for instance, Stone did in his works on the aristocracy and on family, sex, and marriage in early modern England. It is also important that some sources, especially court records, have been used extensively both qualitatively and quantitatively in social history writing. Moreover, in the late twentieth century a renewed desire to return politics to the social historical agenda, a "linguistic turn" that emphasizes the methods of textual and literary criticism, the rise of a "new" cultural history, and microhistory, encouraged historians to cast their source nets more widely and to adopt unfamiliar ways of exploring old standbys, such as wills, fiction, and court cases.

Besides the rough quantitative-qualitative split discussed above, sources can be further divided into four broad categories:

1. sources produced by government or administrative agencies, broadly defined;
2. nongovernmental sources or those created by private groups and individuals, including businesses;
3. researcher-generated sources, including interviews and oral histories; and
4. nonwritten sources and artifacts.

Many of these are deposited in archives and libraries, but they may also remain in private hands. Artifacts may not be "deposited" in any real sense at all, although of course archives, museums, and private collections preserve large numbers of artifacts. The first two categories have proven the richest sources for social historical studies.

GOVERNMENTAL SOURCES

The governing process at local, national, and international levels begets a range of sources and vast quantities of material suitable for historical inquiries. Archives maintained by government agencies house the bulk of these records. Although some scholars have criticized such sources for revealing only the perspective of elites, almost all historians plow these fertile fields. Despite frequent and extensive use by researchers over decades, their riches are far from depleted. While the variety of these documents is immense, social historians have most regularly and thoroughly mined tax rolls and censuses; criminal, civil, and ecclesiastical court cases; notarial records, especially wills; parish registers; property accounts; guild and union records; and police files. Obviously other sources that some might consider purely political or even diplomatic, such as the records of city councils or the military, can also yield vital information for the social historian. Indeed the social historian who probes issues of state and society, for example, ignores at his or her peril the actions of governing bodies, such as city councils and parliaments, or the inner workings of political parties as they discussed and molded social, welfare, economic, and cultural policies.

Historians and demographers who investigate population movements regularly use tax rolls, censuses, and parish registers to amass information about the movement of peoples and to collect raw data for calculations of mortality, morbidity, nuptiality, and fertility. In the history of governance, however, the census is a relatively recent phenomenon. At least theoretically censuses make a comprehensive accounting of a specified population. The word "census" is of Latin origin, and the Romans took what they called censuses principally for computing tax burdens and for purposes of military conscription. Modern censuses, those meant to include all or almost all of the members of a given population, date from the eighteenth century and only became a normal and usual function of government in the nineteenth century. The U.S. census, for instance, began in 1790. Its purpose was explicitly political, that is, to calculate seats in the House of Representatives. Some European states had initiated censuses earlier, but they were rarely inclusive. Social historians and demographers use censuses to determine the movement of people; the composition of a population; employment patterns; the relative wealth and poverty of a population and its segments; racial and ethnic makeups; standards of living; settlement patterns; and types of housing.

Despite the wealth of facts they contain, censuses have proven less useful for historians and demographers in determining mortality, morbidity, marriage, and birthrates. In the nineteenth century most states mandated civil registers of births, marriages, deaths, and in some cases disease occurrences. The registration of the last pertained mostly to infectious or contagious diseases, especially to sexually transmitted ones. Civil records deliver to medical historians meaningful information about diseases, but they also permit scholars to develop perspectives on vital statistics and compare them synchronically and diachronically. Governments generally prepare aggregate data and publish it in printed volumes of statistics; in digitalized and machine-readable forms; on CD-ROMs; and on the Internet. These aggregations then serve as sources, rendering to researchers an abundance of analyzable material. Such database collections have also been compiled for earlier times.

Scholars doing demographic, population, and family reconstruction studies for periods before censuses and civil registers were introduced normally consult parish registers. Raw data for the quantitative analysis of the size and the health of populations first were generated in the sixteenth century, when some Protestant parishes began keeping track of births and deaths by recording christenings and burials as well as weddings. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) mandated that Catholic parishes record similar occurrences. Even before such specialized registers existed, the bills of mortality began recording deaths from plague in Milan in 1452. The most famous of these bills date from the great plague of London in the mid 1660s. Historians of the family have often used such sources to reconstruct families and households. Louis Henry pioneered the method of family reconstruction in the 1950s to study fertility among French women. Subsequently family reconstruction re-created entire parishes and whole villages, as demonstrated in Arthur Imhof's Die verlorenen Welten (1984) and David Sabean's two volumes on the Württemberg village of Neckarhausen (1990, 1998). The application of statistical packages and computer programs has facilitated and accelerated the task of family reconstruction.

Tax rolls, known as cadastres in the medieval and early modern periods, and tax records, including property, income, excise, and sales, furnish equally sustaining nourishment for knowledge-hungry social and economic historians. Historians who plot shifting patterns of wealth occasionally employ extremely sophisticated statistical techniques to discover and evaluate the rise or fall of real wages and to determine relative standards of living. They often work comparatively, linking societies chronologically, geographically, or both. The assemblage of prosopographies or collective biographies relies heavily on tax rolls as well as on censuses, parish registers, and wills. Real estate records and property plans, urban and rural, function in a like manner, allowing historians to determine patterns of landholding and uses and alterations in them over time.

Social historians have exploited court records, particularly criminal records, extensively and creatively and to many different purposes. Historians who ascertained secular developments in crime, for example, the striking decline in personal offenses and the equally striking rise in property crime after the Middle Ages, turned to court records, both secular and ecclesiastical. For the early modern period these documents are far more likely to exist for towns than for rural areas. Some cities possess enviable series of unbroken records. Amsterdam's, for example, run from the late sixteenth century through the early nineteenth century. These records have yielded valuable information on issues far removed from crime by revealing the lives of those who left little other evidence. Criminal acts frequently occasioned extensive, probing investigations that produced dossiers rich in details. In these records historians often recover the voices of those who otherwise would have remained mute. Court cases have permitted social historians to construct sophisticated studies of prostitution, such as that of Lotte van de Pol for Amsterdam, and equally fascinating treatments of other aspects of everyday life in major urban centers. The deliberations and decisions of ecclesiastical courts disclose the dimensions of religious dissent of course but also broader morals, common attitudes, and daily routines. Historians have made astonishing discoveries in the annals of the various Catholic inquisitions. Heavily exploited in quantitative terms to trace, for instance, the numbers and characters of the persecutions of heretics, such documents also have been useful in building microhistories.

Microhistory arose as a reaction to a prevalent trend in social history, that is, the practice of studying large groups by evaluating masses of material and seeking to define overarching structures. Historians who practice the abductive method of microhistory turn instead to examining a few extraordinarily revealing documents, often those that record unique or sensational events, such as the incidents of early modern cannibalism studied by Edward Muir. These scholars seek to reinsert individuals and historical agency into history by revealing the contours of European popular culture. The most famous examples of a successful microhistorical approach are Carlo Ginzburg's story of a heretic miller in The Cheese and the Worms (1980) and Natalie Zemon Davis's brilliantly retold tale of The Return of Martin Guerre (1983).

Police files function in many of the same ways as court records. Police records per se developed when governments began to recast police forces as executory agencies and created policemen in the nineteenth century. Police records reveal much about those people society defined as criminals, yet their utility far exceeds that objective. Police agents also infiltrated trade unions and kept a watch on other groups considered suspicious or deemed deviant. Therefore much knowledge about early unions, such as the Trade Unions Congress (TUC) or the seemingly innocuous friendly societies in Britain, derives from police reports filed on groups and individuals.

Notarial records are of inestimable worth in reconstructing everyday lives. Notaries were legally empowered to compose, witness, and certify the validity of documents and to take depositions. In addition they drew up wills and marriage agreements. Their archives are voluminous but usually poorly indexed and thus cumbersome to consult. Notarial records, especially wills, have helped count and calculate wealth and family arrangements; document trends in religious beliefs, as Michel Vovelle traced the progress of dechristianization; prove affective relationships within families; follow the movement of property and goods among kin; and analyze the role of gender in familial and business relationships. The possibilities for the historical exploitation of notarial records are by no means exhausted by this list. Late twentieth-century studies used notarial records to observe the dynamics of migrant communities in early modern Europe.

Finally, the records of guilds and unions can be included among administrative or governmental sources. Unions differ from guilds in that they represent laborers rather than all the members of a particular craft. A new phenomenon in the nineteenth century, labor unions generally kept their own records, which, along with the accounts of political parties, sometimes were placed in government safekeeping. At the end of the twentieth century many unions and political parties maintained their own archives distinct from government collections. Guilds (and unions, too, to some extent) were multifunctional organizations that exercised cultural, philanthropic, and religious functions as well as economic ones. Their records not only reveal details about economic structures and production methods but also trace religious, social, and cultural trends among nonelite groups. Those interested in the history of industrialization and the rise of free-trade practices have used guild materials and in particular disputes among apprentices, journeymen, and masters to follow subtle shifts in the business world, especially during periods of economic upheaval, depression, or boom. These records have been equally useful in documenting the early history of consumerism. The right to produce new commodities, such as umbrellas in the seventeenth century or porcelain in the eighteenth century, had to be negotiated among the various craft guilds. But guilds also formed defenses against new entrepreneurs, like the porcelain manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood, who worked outside the craft system.

NONGOVERNMENTAL SOURCES

Historians generally seek the more or less official records described above in archives and libraries, yet non-governmental material frequently reposes in archives and libraries as well. Personal papers, memoirs, business records, and clipping files or scrapbooks are often deposited for preservation in archives even though they properly belong to the category of private and personal records. Newspapers, magazines, prescriptive literature, and fictional works are found more frequently in libraries than in archives, although many archives house extensive runs of newspapers.

Social historians have quarried newspapers for a multitude of reasons. Obviously newspapers, a novelty of the eighteenth century, help determine what happened. Yet the definition of "what happened" differs for the social historian as compared to the diplomatic or political historian. The social historian might be more interested in articles on society and culture or in advertisements and letters to the editor than in so-called hard news. Of course newspapers reported on political issues that bore on social history directly or indirectly, for example, parliamentary debates on the implementation of social insurance schemes or old-age pensions. Other historians have looked at advertisements to document, for instance, the rise of a consumer culture, the proliferation of goods and services, the growth of pharmaceutical and patent medicine businesses, and a burgeoning book trade. The rise of the penny press has much to say about changing tastes among the reading public and about rates of literacy. The history of fashion, too, can be pursued in newspaper columns. Few social historical topics cannot but be enriched by a thorough survey of contemporary newspapers and magazines.

An early type of what might be called a general-interest magazine that lacked pictures and advertising was the moral weekly that appeared in manuscript in the seventeenth century and in print in the next century. Journals, like Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's Spectator (1711–1712), the most famous and the most widely imitated of the many moral weeklies, had literary pretensions. But more important for the purposes of the social historian, they also critiqued conventional morals and society. Akin to the moral weeklies but more practical in content, the publications of the many "beneficial" and "purposeful" organizations of the mid- to late eighteenth century were explicit attempts to stimulate improvements in agriculture, business, and commerce as well as manners and morals. Titles like The Patriot (Der Patriot) in Hamburg (1721–1723) were generally moral in tone and content. But the Deliberations (Verhandlungen und Schriften) of the Patriotic Society founded later in Hamburg (1765) focused on practical proposals for the best ways to relieve the poor, raise silkworms, or build and maintain urban hospitals. In the Netherlands The Merchant (De Koopman) discussed economic morality and proper commercial behavior in the 1760s but also detailed schemes for reawakening a flagging commerce and animating declining industries in the republic.

Journals shade over into another source that social historians have exploited quite lavishly and sometimes slavishly, prescriptive literature. This literature includes all publications that prescribe behavior, like catechisms, sermons, advice manuals, and articles in newspapers and journals, for instance, women's magazines. Prescriptive literature touches on practically every topic of concern to social historians. For example, women received advice on household management, on style, on "getting and keeping a man," on sex, on the proper expression of emotions, and on the choice of a career. Newly enthroned experts, such as physicians, addressed a plentitude of advice literature to parents about how to raise their children. Easy to find and use, such material provides a surfeit of information on social standards and behavioral expectations. Prescriptive literature is, however, less serviceable in determining what people actually did than in determining what they were instructed to do. Thus advice literature may produce a false picture of reality unless combined with other sources.

Social historians once used novels, poems, plays, and other forms of fiction as illustrative material or as contemporary "witnesses" of their times. These sources fell out of fashion as the new social history, with its tendency to emphasize masses or large groups of people and nonliterate persons or nonelites, took firm hold. In the early twenty-first century, however, under the impact of the new cultural history and after the "linguistic turn," social historians returned to belles lettres, reading them as texts, often deconstructing them into their component parts, pinpointing where concepts and phrases originated, and identifying the extent to which they represented a cultural heritage that linked popular and elite cultures. Immensely influential both as a theoretical work and as an example, Mikhail Bakhtin's study of François Rabelais identified a culture of the grotesque that elites and nonelites shared.

Not only governments and organizations such as guilds assembled and maintained documentary collections. Various other organizations, voluntary, philanthropic, and mutual benefit, for instance, preserved their records as well. Moreover personal papers and "ego-documents" are indispensable aids if sometimes also lucky finds for historians in general and for the social historian in particular. Many social historians have expressed considerable skepticism about the value of government-generated sources for writing an informed and reliable history from the bottom up and therefore search for more personal and immediate materials in less-known and less-frequented archives.

Commercial records are invaluable in composing economic and business histories and in investigating the lives of laborers through personnel records. Historians have emphasized the utility of such sources in constructing collective biographies (or prosopographies, the technical term for early modern collective biographies) of several social classes or status groups. Yet much there is worthy of the attention of anyone interested in the development of business cultures or the involvement of business in matters of welfare and social insurance or for scholars studying patterns of production and consumerism.

A number of private groups, such as philanthropic and eleemosynary societies, for example, the Coram Foundling Hospital in London, clubs, ladies' charitable circles, suffragette groups, friendly societies, benevolent associations, and international leagues like the YMCA and YWCA, construct, staff, and maintain their own collections. Such sources form the nucleus for institutional histories but expedite or make possible other kinds of historical inquiries as well. Benevolent societies can reveal much about laborers' quotidian experiences, for example. An investigation of clubs might demonstrate how networks of sociability evolved and contributed to the creation of a public sphere, such as that postulated by Jürgen Habermas, or reveal the social and philanthropic activities that women dominated.

A wide range of what might be called nondeposited sources is also available. To some extent these include things that have not been identified as sources or whose existence is unknown to the historical community. Some ingenuity is required. Michael B. Miller, for instance, found and catalogued many of the business records of the Parisian grand magasin (department store), the Bon Marché, stored in the building, and he marshalled them into a history of marketing, consumerism, and bourgeois culture in late nineteenth-century France. Poking around in old edifices, attics, barns, and outbuildings has produced unsuspected cornucopias. Serendipity is not to be scorned; some of the most mesmerizing historical finds have been accidental. Judith Brown's lively account of a lesbian nun in seventeenth-century Italy (Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, 1986) rested on just such a fortuitous discovery. Historians sometimes judge it expedient to advertise in national or local newspapers or in more specialized journals to locate previously unsuspected caches. The diligent prying of historians has brought to light casebooks of physicians, surgeons, and midwives; bundles of letters and diaries; and annotated almanacs that had been left to molder away in attics or basements.

In the late twentieth century historians paid increasing attention to what Dutch and German scholars call "ego-documents." These are not traditional biographies or autobiographies but rather the writings of ordinary people, often those living on the edge of respectable society, who never intended to publish their manuscripts. The term sometimes is expanded to include contemporary narratives written about such people. A good example of such a contemporary account is F. L. Kersteman's De bredasche heldinne (The heroine from Breda, 1751). A number of these have been uncovered, edited, and published and have aided social historians in lifting individuals out of the maelstrom of history by endowing ordinary lives with agency, dignity, and texture. Admittedly these documents have clarified the actions and thoughts of the idiosyncratic and the marginal more than those of the average person. Nonetheless, such works are equally precious for comprehending the choices ordinary people made and understanding why they embarked on their courses of action. Ego-documents have demonstrated how the rigid categories constructed by historians preoccupied with studying large groups and big structures might be less confining in practice and how even the menu peuple (lesser folk) exercised volition.

RESEARCHER-GENERATED SOURCES

Not all scholars, however, look at sources held in archives, libraries, or private hands. Many social historical documents are generated by researchers themselves. Interviews, oral histories, and photographs are excellent examples of common researcher-generated materials. Another such source might be the databases historians have built up from raw numbers that are evaluated either by the researchers or by others for further, often different forms of historical analysis.

Interviews and oral histories seem for the most part restricted to recent historical events and circumstances where the subjects are still alive and talking. Oral historians have sought ways to recover the lineaments of ordinary lives, probing aspects of sexuality and emotions, for example, that written records might fail to reveal or even conceal. Historians studying nonliterate societies employ anthropological techniques to reclaim knowledge about groups that left behind few or no written traces. While it is true that sometimes the oral recitation of legends, epics, and tales permits the historian to delve far back in history using sophisticated methods of recovery and regression, most oral histories focus on those who articulate their own stories. Not all oral histories or interviews, for that matter, are primarily researcher-generated. Oral history projects, the most famous of which is the American Federal Writer's Project of the 1930s that chronicled the memories of former slaves, assemble teams of interviewers to collect oral histories on tape, as interview notes, or from questionnaires. The tapes or transcripts are then deposited in archives and made available to others, who often use them for purposes entirely distinct from those the original collectors envisioned.

Another example of a generated source is the database. Databases are usually compilations of statistical materials or raw data that can be quantified. The material is arranged to make it easy or easier to search and retrieve information. Large-scale projects, such as demographic studies extending over centuries or investigations of family size and composition, require enormous databases. Examples include the Demographic Database in Umeå, Sweden, an outstanding source for the study of mortality, morbidity, and fertility trends; and the database built by the Cambridge (England) Group for the History of Population and Social Structure for analyzing small groups, such as the household and the family, over time.

NONWRITTEN SOURCES AND ARTIFACTS

Photographs are another form of evidence that is sometimes researcher-generated but that, like artifacts, is not written. Most archives and libraries have large photographic and iconographic collections of photographs and other pictorial material, such as paintings, drawings, posters, lithographs, woodcuts, medals, and icons. Social historians have used iconography for a wide variety of purposes. While many historians are content to employ pictures as illustrations, others have used them more subtly and creatively in forging their arguments. There depictions become evidence and proof. Caroline Bynum's study of female saints, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987), uses iconography portraying holy women and Christ figures to link physicality and medieval religiosity. Robert Scribner's For the Sake of Simple Folk (1981) made woodcuts an integral part of his portrayal of the faith of "simple folk" during the Reformation. Photographs have provided analytical material for many modern historical studies on family life, street culture, industrialization, technology, and the commercialization of leisure among others. Other nonwritten sources—moving pictures, films, advertisements, playbills, and fashions—can be employed similarly, although all require the mastery of techniques peculiar to the specific medium. Pictures are no more transparent than other media.

Maps and collections of maps are less integral to most social historical inquiries, although zoning maps, street plans, and field divisions have been effective in discussions of housing configurations, the construction of community, local patterns of sociability, agricultural change, and even the structuring of patronage-clientage axes in neighborhoods. Medical historians have deployed maps to demonstrate the relationships between diseases and socioeconomic factors, such as poverty.

Other nonwritten sources fall into the category of artifacts. While artifacts may be found in libraries and archives, they are just as often not. Museums, especially those devoted to representations of everyday life, provide information for historians who study material culture as well as urban and rural lifestyles. Furniture; conveyances, such as carriages, automobiles, and airplanes; household items, such as dishes and cooking utensils; clothing; and even knickknacks illuminate the physical conditions of life among a range of social groups or classes.

Architecture, too, is important. Open-air museums contain real buildings or replicas that represent the types of housing people inhabited and often exhibit the physical layout of villages and neighborhoods. When older sections of cities and villages still exist, these living museums are critically important for giving historians a viscerally real sense of place. Nothing conveys the feel of a medieval city better than a stroll down one of its serpentine streets. The vistas of Georges-Eugène Haussmann's Paris convey the culture of the European belle epoque, as do the paintings of Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In the last two decades of the twentieth century cultural historians "read" monuments, memorials, and hallowed sites for their historical content in efforts to construct histories of memory and commemoration. Likewise the concepts of display, representation, and self-fashioning have required historians to interpret statues and paintings as well as texts for information on how, for instance, regal figures like Louis XIV devised their special images of kingship and exerted authority.

The intriguing subject of social space and its construction leads historians to look at the layout of roads and places, especially where public spectacles such as executions and fireworks were staged, and to seek information on how class, status, and gender determined the allocation of space. Historians have also investigated the political implications of public spaces and performances, among them Lynn Hunt in her study of class and culture in the French Revolution and Mona Ozouf in her investigation of revolutionary festivals.

This brief survey of the sources of social history by no means exhausts the topic. Rather, it merely highlights the fact that almost no document is without its use for social history. Social historians have been and will continue to be imaginative in their application of sources and unflagging in their attempts to unearth new ones.

Social history once was termed the history of the "inarticulate." In fact, through discovery of new sources and innovative uses of familiar ones, social historians have advanced a host of topics previously considered unresearchable. Consequently the field has moved from areas with abundant records, such as protests, to cover a much wider range of topics and groups, many of which have gaps in data. For instance, it is hard to document how children experienced childhood, or to pinpoint the frequency of adulterous behaviors, though qualitative evidence of divorce cases provides clues. The discovery of new sources and the clever exploitation of older ones have allowed social history to remain fresh and innovative and have reduced the sense that some areas of life will be forever veiled to the historical gaze.

See alsoPrinting and Publishing (volume 5); and other articles in this section.

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