Tema 1
Hal S. Barron
Univ. of Claremont, California, U.S.A.
"Recent Trends in U.S. Social History,"
This paper provides a critical overview of several important developments
in the field of U.S. Social History over the past fifteen years.
One of these has been the rise of a new rural history. In contrast to the
more traditional field of agricultural history, which focuses primarily on
the history and economic impact of agricultural production, rural history
seeks to reconstruct the social relations that characterized life in the
United States countryside. Along these lines, a central debate has
revolved around the social meanings of the spread of commercialized
agriculture during the first half of the ninteteenth century - America's
Agricultural Revolution. More recent work has looked at the role of
ethnicity in the countryside and the nature of women's work on the farm as
well as such twentieth-century issues as the relationships of rural people
to the rise of the city, the centralization of the state, and the emergence
of consumer culture.
Another dynamic area of inquiry has been the history of immigration and
ethnicity. Following the lead of Frank Thistlethwaite almost forty years
ago, historians of immigration and ethnicity have moved away from a
U.S.-centered analysis, which celebrated the acculturation and
Americanization of immigrants, to a view that is both global and
comparative and emphasizes a more nuanced and complicated process of
cultural transformation marked by continuity as well as change. For
European immigrants at least, a growing sense of "whiteness" proved central
to this process, although the experiences of the southern Italians and
other so-called "in-between" groups offer interesting variations on this
theme. More recent work on immigration across the Pacific has extended the
scope of this historiography even further and has complicated the view of
race in American society as simply a black and white dichotomy.
As the last example implies, the rewriting of the history of the American
West has also been a lively project during the past decade and a half. In
contrast to the triumphalist narratives that have dominated the field since
Frederick Jackson Turner invented it over a century ago, more recent work
reconsiders that history with respect to the experiences of idigenous
people, other people of color, and women, as well as the environment.
Whether the West can be defined best as a geographic region, or as a kind
of unique social process, though, remains the locus of heated debate.