When fish walk on land: social history in a postmodern world - Central Issues

by Nicole Eustace

I was talking with friends the other night when someone mentioned a startling fact; there is such a thing as a walking fish. Birds have wings and fly; beasts have feet and walk; and fish have fins and swim. This much I thought I knew. Nevertheless, a certain species known as Channa argus argus was lately brought to Florida from its native China and has since begun a long stroll up the eastern coast. And it also turns out that certain kinds of organisms, like fungi, can't be classified as either animals or plants and so must be consigned to a kingdom all their own. What in the world is going on?

With categories of analysis in the supposedly objective and empirical world of science rapidly coming undone, it should come as no surprise that history is suffering a similar epistemological crisis. But perhaps crisis is the wrong word. Culmination might be more apt. Could it be that in history, as in all areas of human knowledge, we are finally ready to concede that there is no single story, no total system, that will encompass and explain all we want to know? More than thirty years ago, social history embarked on the bold project of bringing science to history; I think it would not be premature to state that it has ended up bringing history to science--and to history itself. (1)

To assess the current state and future directions of social history requires first an account of its origins, of its founding aims and purposes. Of course, the exact timing of the advent of the now old "new social history" is itself debatable. Still, so many have identified the year 1970 as a remarkable turning point that it seems a most reasonable starting point. It was in that year that four books on early American history, widely hailed as path-breaking then and since, first broke on the historical scene. These four studies, John Demos's A Little Commonwealth, Philip Greven, Jr.'s Four Generations, Kenneth Lockridge's A New England Town and Michael Zuckerman's Peaceable Kingdoms each announced, with greater and lesser degrees of fanfare, that history was about to undergo an irrevocable change. Indeed, the revolutionary nature of the new social history, at least within the field of early American studies, was considerably advanced by the self-conscious nature of this activist collaboration. To begin, then, let's listen again to a few notes of those early clarion calls. (2)

Kenneth Lockridge (who thanked, among others, both Philip Greven, Jr. and Michael Zuckerman in the acknowledgements he composed in March of 1969) began his introduction modestly enough by observing that, "the past is a mixture of often contradictory events whose meaning is sometimes ambiguous." Yet he soon went on to say that "previous layers of scholarly inquiry must be laid aside" in order to overturn the "myths which have so long prevailed." Following Peter Laslett, Lockridge set out to recover the lost "world which made our world," to "sharpen our perception of the earliest sources of our national character" and to seek the roots of American democracy by describing in depth community life in a New England town. (3)

To do so, Lockridge proposed to draw on "many techniques of social-science analysis" but promised skittish readers that such techniques would not "intrude" on an otherwise "simple narrative framework." Lockridge's main concern about his own work was that in choosing to detail the textures of community in Dedham, Massachusetts, he was "running the risk of describing an untypical example." Still, he felt reasonably sure that "similar events in other towns" would "[end strength" to the main features of his arguments and that the resulting opportunity to "deal thoroughly" with his subject was well worth the potential risks of looking at a single place. (4)

A few months later, in June of 1969, Philip Greven, Jr. proclaimed in the preface to his book that, "a significant change in the way historians study the past may now be taking place" and referred interested readers to the work of Demos and Lockridge in an accompanying footnote. Greven's stated designs looked still more radical than Lockridge's. While Lockridge's methods might have been considered unorthodox, his underlying interest in democracy and his goal of understanding American national character would not have appeared entirely unreasonable to those schooled on the likes of Perry Miller's The New England Mind. Greven, on the other hand, announced more baldly that historians should favor populations over nations and "explore the basic structure and character of society through close, detailed examinations of... individuals, families, and groups in particular communities." His project traced inheritance patterns and land distribution over four generations of Andover men in order to uncover the patriarchal powers of colonial fathers. Greven's emphasis on social structure, as opposed to political ideas and institutions, was radically new. And, like Lockridge, he shared "the assumption that historians must use the techniques and questions of other disciplines, including historical demography, sociology, and psychology" since he and those of his generation had "become aware of the value and importance of quantifiable data." (5)

Still, Greven hastened to add that his generation still "believe[d] that the historian must also use imagination and intuition continuously," that the art/science distinction was not really useful in a discipline that so clearly required both. Unlike Lockridge, Greven's main bugaboo was not typicality, but rather the nature of his evidence. Considering the problem at length in an introduction devoted to "problems, sources, and methods," he began by stating confidently that if "examined with care and imagination," quantitative evidence from probate records and the like "actually reveals more about the lives and actions of ordinary individuals and families than has been ascertained from studies of literary sources alone." Yet he ended his introduction in a slightly more hesitant key, admitting that, "questions involving the innermost workings of families.., are particularly difficult to document from such records." Still, Greven did not wish to dwell on this drawback, preferring in the end to emphasize how "remarkable" it was how much could "be discovered by such a method about the lives and actions of ordinary people." (6)

Michael Zuckerman followed close on Greven's heels, composing a preface in July of 1969 in which he thanked Lockridge among others while announcing the central thesis of his book, that "sociability and its attendant constraints have always governed the American character more than the individualism we vaunt." Perhaps because his argument itself was so iconoclastic, denying as it did, the centrality of the democratic impulse in American history, Zuckerman felt less need than either Lockridge or Greven to expound on the novelty of his topic or methods. Nevertheless, in several key respects his basic aims and attitudes reflected important attributes of the emerging field of social history. He sought to discover the "arguments and axioms which ordered the daily lives of the many ... not the ratified philosophies [of] ... a few towering figures." Concerned to capture the popular ethos of an era, he was undisturbed that his argument made "little of development and change." (7)

These concordances were further displayed in Zuckerman's introduction. Like Lockridge who railed against myth, Zuckerman regretted that the "archetypal New England town ha[d] been tied only tenuously to the actual one, its inhabitants ... reduced to caricatures." Zuckerman did not bother to proclaim the importance of the social sciences in history, but did offhandedly drop a reference to the views of "social psychologists" on "democratic character." If Zuckerman's overall tone was less explicitly evangelistic than that of the others, it may be because he had himself already so fully converted. (8)

Coming last in this quick succession of books, (he composed his forward in September of 1969) John Demos was well placed to appreciate the weight of Greven's claims of a generational historiographic shift. Tipping his hat to both Greven and Lockridge, Demos boldly declared at the outset of his study of family in Puritan Plymouth that it "seemed important to try to know average people in the everyday routine of their lives." Though respectful and appreciative of the prior work of Edmund Morgan on the Puritan family, Demos was wary of the undue weight of the "affluent and educated classes" on conclusions drawn from literary sources. Even more forcefully than Lockridge or Greven, Demos insisted on the importance of using "'quantitative' measures whenever possible," while also trying "to fit the evidence from Plymouth with appropriate theoretical models ... borrowed from various branches of behavioral science." Above all, Demos desired to "limit the impressionistic presentation so common in historical writing" based on a "small number of illustrative 'examples'" from literary sources. Instead, echoing Lockridge and Zuckerman both, he sought to "introduce a greater degree of precision into a field which heretofore has been widely influenced by popular myth." (9)