Suchergebnisse

This article examines papers presented at the "Beyond 'Free' and 'Unfree' Labor" Conference held at the University of Illinois at Chicago in April 2016. It extracts salient themes and questions about the status of labor history in the growing field of the history of capitalism. Topics discussed include the role of the state in the economy, tensions concerning the separation of the so-called private and public spheres, and changes to labor regimes over time.

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.