Social history has become an evident cornerstone of historiography. Organized since the early 20th century through the Annales school and considered a driving force in historical research, social history has developed, expanded, diversified, and refracted in response to successive transformations in the field of history. Initially tied to economic history, it gradually became associated with cultural history. Early research focused on mechanisms shaping the structuring of social groups (through control of power channels, stratifications, and hierarchies), but during the 1970s, social historians turned their attention to anthropological principles that could explain the social order. Consequently, representations, symbolism, biology, and underlying mythologies were studied as integral components of social history.
More recently, globalized history has shifted questions toward the social history of circulations, contacts, and divergences between distinct social and cultural groups. In this infinite array of methodological and empirical approaches to historically capturing the most varied human practices, social history has evolved into a sort of shared intelligibility framework—a self-evident matrix that is continuously reworked.
Given the current state of historiography, there is room for a publication that restores the perpetually distinctive traits of social history while seriously engaging with the concrete forms of human organization in relationships of domination, power dynamics, hierarchical principles, and systems of classification. From gender history to labor history, subaltern studies to the history of representations (artistic or otherwise), and including the history of knowledge, ideas, political mobilizations, rural life, consumption, media, sociability, or urban phenomena, the themes are vast. All these areas highlight key aspects of how societies are historically constructed.
Other journals address social history either directly (Le Mouvement social) or more indirectly (La Revue d’histoire du xixe siècle), but they are chronologically focused on the contemporary period and geographically on the West. The Revue d’histoire sociale aims to embrace all historical periods, avoid limiting itself to recent times, and cover the widest possible geographic scope. In this context, it also seeks to examine the interplay between local and global scales.
Furthermore, la Revue d’histoire sociale is committed to fostering dialogue and exchange with other disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, education sciences, geography, philosophy, archaeology, psychology, and even literature, which now offers numerous insights into social questions.
Building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Gérard Noiriel, Arlette Farge, Madeleine Rebérioux, Edward P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Norbert Elias, Rolande Trempé and Carlo Ginzburg, we aim to create a publishing platform that highlights the diverse contributions of social history across all historical periods. Since social history interrogates the social order as it is or has been, this effort will extend beyond academic foundations to include mediation and popularization. The journal will welcome contributions from historians of social movements, trade unionism, and popular practices.
The journal addresses academics, students, the general public interested in social history, and professionals in the fields of mediation and history popularization.
La Revue d’histoire sociale will be annual and exclusively digital. Each issue will include an editorial, a thematic dossier, varia (miscellaneous articles), pieces on mediating social history, articles on visual and image-based social history, an interview with a prominent figure in the discipline, book reviews, and a bibliography recommendation section.