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.
Eugene Dominic Genovese was an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He was noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the Bancroft Prize. He later abandoned the left and Marxism and embraced traditionalist conservatism. He wrote during the Cold War and his political beliefs were viewed by some as highly controversial at the time.
Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 is a history of the Reconstruction era by W. E. B. Du Bois, first published in 1935. The book challenged the standard academic view of Reconstruction at the time, the Dunning School, which contended that the period was a failure and downplayed the contributions of African Americans. Du Bois instead emphasized the agency of Black people and freed slaves during the Civil War and Reconstruction and framed the period as one that held promise for a worker-ruled democracy to replace a slavery-based plantation economy.
William Archibald Dunning was an American historian and political scientist at Columbia University noted for his work on the Reconstruction era of the United States. He founded the informal Dunning School of interpreting the Reconstruction era through his own writings and the Ph.D. dissertations of his numerous students.
The history of education in the United States covers the trends in formal education in America from the 17th century to the early 21st century.
Sheila Mary Fitzpatrick is an Australian historian, whose main subjects are history of the Soviet Union and history of modern Russia, especially the Stalin era and the Great Purges, of which she proposes a "history from below", and is part of the "revisionist school" of Communist historiography. She has also critically reviewed the concept of totalitarianism and highlighted the differences between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in debates about comparison of Nazism and Stalinism.
Educational anthropology, or the anthropology of education, is a sub-field of socio-cultural anthropology that focuses on the role that culture has in education, as well as how social processes and cultural relations are shaped by educational settings. To do so, educational anthropologists focus on education and multiculturalism, educational pluralism, culturally relevant pedagogy and native methods of learning and socializing. Educational anthropologists are also interested in the education of marginal and peripheral communities within large nation states. Overall, educational anthropology tends to be considered as an applied field, as the focus of educational anthropology is on improving teaching learning process within classroom settings.
Robert Mason Hauser is an American sociologist. He is the Vilas Research and Samuel F. Stouffer professor of sociology emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he served as director of the Institute for Research on Poverty and the Center for Demography of Health and Aging.
Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America is a 1971 book by American historian Michael B. Katz. The book focuses on the history of education in the United States between 1800 and 1885 in public elementary schools, and follows their transition from one-room schools to centralized, bureaucratic school systems. The book was revised and expanded in 1975.
Huck's Raft is a history of American childhood and youth, written by Steven Mintz. The 2006 H-Net review wrote that the book was the best single-volume history of its kind.
An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre is book written by Paul Avrich. It is a biography of Voltairine de Cleyre.
The Haymarket Tragedy is a 1984 history book by Paul Avrich about the Haymarket affair and the resulting trial.
Anarchist Portraits is a 1988 history book by Paul Avrich about the lives and personalities of multiple prominent and inconspicuous anarchists.
Free the Children: Radical Reform and the Free School Movement is the first book-length account of the free school movement written by Allen Graubard and published by Pantheon Books in 1972.
Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present is a 1995 history of preschool education in the United States written by Barbara Beatty.
The Progressive Education Association was a group dedicated to the spread of progressive education in American public schools from 1919 to 1955. The group focused on pedagogy in elementary schools through the twenties. The group turned towards public schools and sociopolitical issues in the early 1930s, and launched three commissions into progressive school topics. The Eight-Year Study tested how American progressive secondary schools would prepare their students for college when released from the curricular restrictions of college admissions requirements. The other two commissions addressed curriculum towards the needs of democracy and students, and teaching materials to serve children's psychological needs. After a peak of activity in the late 1930s, the group struggled to regain its position of thought leadership and reconcile the competing interests within the group. It collapsed in the mid-1950s amidst rising anti-progressive education sentiment in cultural trends including political conservatism and anti-intellectualism, school standardization, and emphasis on vocational education.
Taylor Stoehr (1931–2013) was an American professor and author. He edited several volumes of Paul Goodman's work as his literary executor.
Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914 is a 2007 history book by Tom Goyens following the lives of German immigrant radicals in New York City.
David F. Labaree is a historian of education and Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University.
Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life is a nonfiction book about critical pedagogy by Henry Giroux. In the book Giroux analyzes and critiques various concepts of pedagogy, arguing that schools should not be subservient to the existing power structure but should instead be sites of struggle and exist in solidarity with the oppressed. He adopts the framework of citizenship education, defining citizenship as the struggle for empowerment.
