Social history

Social history, often called "history from below", is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians.

Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading from schools of thought in the United Kingdom and France which posited that the Great Man view of history was inaccurate because it did not adequately explain how societies changed. Instead, social historians wanted to show that change arose from within society, complicating the popular belief that powerful leaders were the source of dynamism. While social history came from the Marxist view of history (historical materialism), the cultural turn and linguistic turn saw the number of sub-fields expand as well as the emergence of other approaches to social history, including a social liberal approach and a more ambiguious critical theory approach.