They were heady days when the first issue of a new history journal was published. The cataclysmic disruptor, the Great War, had ended and many people in the western world were revelling in the moment on a giddy ride skimming the crests of a sea of change. Others were churning the waters in their desire to shed the old ways, to think and do differently. Everything was challenged.<\/p>\n
While momentous change is flung in the face of people through stupendous events, the stirring of the sea that leads to such an upset can be seen in retrospect to have been developing long before the event. The publication of the new history journal, Annales d’histoire \u00e9conomique et sociale<\/em>, in January 1929 formalised a profound change in the way history was written that can be traced back years before.<\/p>\n Western history was political history for much of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. In the halls of cultural power, the history of important, dead, white men was the only history that mattered. But challengers were emerging, among whom were the Marxists. They shone the light on the mass of people previously ignored, and the social and economic structures that shaped their lives. Yet the traditional accounts of history still held sway in the late 1920s when the Annales <\/em>journal emerged from the University of Strasbourg.<\/p>\n The editors, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, went beyond the scope of the Marxists to look at the total context of the history they were examining. Histoire totale<\/em> was their aim. This led them to seek from other disciplines that which would enable them to examine the whole world in which people lived in the past. Geography, psychology, sociology, religion were all within their remit.<\/p>\n It was a student of Febvre that produced another surge in the Annales approach to history. Fernand Braudel published an ambitious book, The Mediterranean and the mediterranean world in the age of Philip 1<\/em> in 1949. From this book the concept of the longue dur\u00e9e<\/em> emerged – \u201cof man in his relationship to the environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles\u201d (p. 20). However, what is regarded as longue dur\u00e9e <\/em>today is probably more akin to Braudel\u2019s medium<\/em> dur\u00e9e, <\/em>which Braudel described as the \u201cswelling currents\u201d, the forces of \u201ceconomic systems, states, societies, civilizations\u201d (pp. 20-21). This view of history looks at the social structures encompassing society rather than the minutiae of a domino of events.<\/p>\n Braudel described the traditional history of political events and those dead, white men as \u201csurface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.\u201d In a passage that I love reading Braudel writes:<\/p>\n A history of brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations, by definition ultra-sensitive; the least tremor sets all its antennae quivering. But as such it is the most exciting of all, the richest in human interest, and also the most dangerous. We must learn to distrust this history with its still burning passions, as it was felt, described, and lived by contemporaries whose lives were as short and as short-sighted as ours. It has the dimensions of their anger, dreams, or illusions.\u201d<\/p>\n p. 21<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Braudel categorised this history as l\u2019histoire \u00e9v\u00e9nementielle<\/em> \u2013 ephemeral history.<\/p>\n In the post-war period a group of Annalistes became absorbed in quantitative history. Green and Troup (p. 147) describe the work of Vovelle who examined the wills of the eighteenth century to draw out changing attitudes towards death. Other historians explored economic statistics. Sometimes this approach produced bad history, but this does not mean the language of numbers and the computer is at fault. Rather, it is a lesson in how important it is that the historian becomes skilled at using the appropriate tools and languages for the research question at hand.<\/p>\n The third surge of Annales <\/em>history brought renewed attention to the inner lives of people in the past. It seeks to tap into the conscious and subconscious thought that formed the pulse of the age, that dictated the patterns of everyday life. To understand the mentalit\u00e9s<\/em> of the past is to understand the past on its own terms. Thomas Dixon explains the importance of the work of Lucien Febvre to anyone researching the history of the emotions on the blog of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions<\/a>.<\/p>\n Annales d’histoire \u00e9conomique et sociale<\/em> was launched eighty-five years ago, but the approaches to history pioneered by the Annales historians is a matter of lively discussion among historians today. An open-access book called The History Manifesto <\/em><\/a>is the subject of a vigorous debate about the benefits of writing about the longue dur\u00e9e<\/em>. This post is preparatory to my next post in which I will review The History Manifesto<\/em>.<\/p>\nFurther Reading<\/h2>\n
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