Social history

Social history, often called the new social history, is a broad branch of history that studies the experiences of ordinary people in the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments. In the two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history rose from 31% to 41%, while the proportion of political historians fell from 40% to 30%. In the history departments of British and Irish universities in 2014, of the 3410 faculty members reporting, 878 (26%) identified themselves with social history while political history came next with 841 (25%).