Social History. What Is It?
- geneal1
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
According to Katherine Scott Sturdevant in her book Bringing Your Family to Life Through Social History, "Social history focuses on ordinary people's everyday lives."
While traditional history tends to focus on names, key political events, and broad trends, social history takes a more down-to-earth approach. It examines how people made a living, raised children, managed their households, and relocated from one place to another. It also sheds light on the impact of storms, war, disease, and cultural changes on everyday people.
Social history can be thought of as a form of up-close and personal history. It can help you
Understand your ancestor's work or military experience
Learn about disease outbreaks
Determine why people left one place and settled in another
Fill in the gaps between census years
Explore your ethnic or cultural heritage
The Digital Public Library of America has an ambitious goal of making the resources of America's libraries, archives, and museums freely available online.
The Making of America is a pair of websites representing a collaborative effort between Cornell University and the University of Michigan, where they have digitized American social history sources. Each of these sites contains a unique collection of books and journal articles on the antebellum period through Reconstruction. The Cornell collection included The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.
Immigration to the United States 1789-1930, information is available through Harvard University's digital collection. This collection covers a wide range of immigrant experiences and is organized by topic.
County and town histories offer rich local detail, while newspapers convey the flavor of a particular time and place. Some sites you might utilize are:
Google Books, https://books.google.com/
Internet Archive. https://archive.org/
Google Newspapers Archive https://news.google.com/newspapers
Chronicling America, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Consider bookmarking these websites for quick and easy access.
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