Social Science History Association

Social Science History Association was formed in 1972 and brings together scholars from numerous disciplines interested in social history.^[1] The Social Science History Association's core purpose is: "To bring together members of various disciplines (including economics, sociology, demography, anthropology, and history) who work with historical materials."^[2]

The association's official journal is Social Science History, a quarterly peer-reviewed academic publication. Its essays handle historical evidence analytically, theoretically, and frequently quantitatively.^[3] The journal's founders intended to "improve the quality of historical explanation" with "theories and methods from the social science disciplines", and to make generalizations across historical cases.^[4] The first issue came out in the fall of 1976.^[4][5] The journal's articles that are most-accessed and cited through JSTOR are about social and political movements and associated narratives.^[6][7]

History

The association was formed in 1976 as an interdisciplinary group with a journal Social Science History and an annual convention. The goal was to incorporate historical studies' perspectives from all the social sciences, especially political science, sociology and economics. The pioneers shared a commitment to quantification. However, by the 1980s critics complained that quantification undervalued the role of contingency and warned against naive positivism. Meanwhile, quantification became well-established inside economics in the field of cliometrics, as well as in political science. In history, quantification remained central to demographic studies, but slipped behind in political and social history.^[8]

See also

• Historiography, Quantification and new approaches to history