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The renewal of social history in the 1960s and thereafter challenged the standard historical emphasis on explanation by motive, validation by motive-revealing texts, and explication by narrative. Social historians divided, however, in their relative emphasis on reconstitution of lives as people lived them and on the establishment of connections between ordinary people's behavior and large social processes such as industrialization. The standard method of social history—collective biography—aids the study of connections more than it aids reconstitution, although its uncritical use often suggests false connections, and many borrowings from the social sciences lead to erroneous analogies. Family history illustrates these points as an exemplar for the study of large-scale social change, as a direct contribution to that study, and as a challenge to its improvement. Among the challenges faced by family history and by social history as a whole are (a) the shift of analyses from calendar time sequences, (b) the identification of coherent social units, (c) the specification of regularities in the behavior of those units. The article presents several examples of each point.

This innovative and provocative work introduces complexity theory and its application to both the study of language and the study of material culture. The book begins with a wide-ranging theoretical background, covering the areas of dialect geography, the anthropological study of material culture, and a general introduction to the study of complex adaptive systems. Following this general introduction, the principles of complexity theory are demonstrated in data drawn from linguistics and material culture studies. Language and Material Culture further highlights the principles of complexity through a series of case studies, using data from the Linguistic Atlas, colonial American inventories and the Historic American Building Survey. LMC shows that language and material culture are intertwined as they interact within the same cultural complex system. The book is designed for students in courses that focus on language variation, American English and material culture, in addition to general courses on applications of complex systems.