Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The group of interdisciplinary historians that emerged in France in the first quarter of the twentieth century became known as a school named for the journal that Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre started in 1929 – Annales de l'histoire économique et sociale , now called Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales . Annales historians have been eclectic in their methods and topics. Their shared perspective (1) subordinates traditional narrative history centered on political, military, and religious elites (e.g., the “scientific history” of the nineteenth-century German Leopold von Ranke) and (2) embraces wide-ranging sources of data and social science methodologies and theories. The diverse results of their scholarship are a testament to the power of colleagues, mentors, and students encouraging one another in manifold interdisciplinary inquiries, even on topics sometimes alien to their own. Scholars like Tocqueville, Marx, and Weber already had eclipsed Ranke with broader sociological visions of history. But the Annales School consolidated that tendency for history proper with their journal and their informal collegial network centered in the École Pratique des Hautes Études, which gained stronger institutionalization in the Boulevard Raspail's Maison des sciences de l'homme – the Paris building finished in 1970 that houses a complex of research centers and institutes. Peter Burke describes ... log in or subscribe to read full text