1. A Hard and Soft Social History
In the post-war decades in Britain, social history, in what may be called its heroic age, was new and fashionable, and could expect to attract devotees by virtue of these qualities alone. From the later twentieth century, the baton for novelty passed to other sub-disciplines such as cultural and gender history. But the change was not simply one of fashion. It represented a major shift in approach from a "hard" to a "soft" social history. Much of ...