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This interdisciplinary volume explores the relationship between history and a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law, literature and anthropology. The relevance of historical approaches within these disciplines has shifted over the centuries. Many of them, like law and economics, originally depended on self-consciously historical procedures. These included the marshalling of evidence from past experience, philological techniques and source criticism. Between the late nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century, the influence of new methods of research, many indebted to models favoured by the natural sciences, such as statistical, analytical or empirical approaches, secured an expanding intellectual authority while the hegemony of historical methods declined in relative terms. In the aftermath of this change, the essays collected in History in the Humanities and Social Sciences reflect from a variety of angles on the relevance of historical concerns to representative disciplines as they are configured today.

This Kitabkhana contribution situates Beshara Doumani's Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History within recent trends in the field of legal history. Doumani's hybrid method, which combines quantitative analysis with qualitative case studies, presents a particularly fruitful model for new work in the field.

Abstract
The paper deals with the state of the social sciences after the boom of internet services in the Czech Republic in the 1990s. The results of our survey, based on 512 responses from the economics and history departments of major Czech public universities, show that internet services are considered a quality factor for academic output; however, the issues of plagiarism, a lack of resource criticism, inadequacy of impact factor-based evaluations, poor academic training for the new generation of social scientists, the failure of state academic policy, and the generation gap make further development in the Czech social sciences rather problematic. As a result we recommend creating a better communication link between policy makers and scholars, reforming the current state policy which encourages lower quality academic output, and improving academic training, which requires a more individual approach, and also placing higher demands on social scientists.

Scientific behavior is as common to the humanities as it is to the social sciences—in fact, many of the humanities are social sciences, a condition that should shame neither party. Though there is a clear intellectual line beween the arts and the sciences, no such line can be drawn between the humanistic social sciences and the "social" social sciences. There is a difference in perceived social status, which could be reduced by a better understanding of the common ground on which the humanist and the social scientist stand, Professor Homans, of Harvard, states as his qualifications "that I took my bachelor's degree in English literature, I am a professor of sociology, and I write history." This article was prepared for the American Council of Learned Societies and is published with its kind permission.