The "Things" of History

Barbara Allen and Lynwood Montell. From Memory to History: Using Oral Sources in Local History Research. Nashville: American Association of State and Local History, 1981.172 + xii pp. Brad Jolly. Videotaping Local History. Nashville : American Association for State and Local History, 1982.160 pp. David E. Kyvig and Myron A. Marty. Nearby History: Exploring the Past Around You. Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1982.300 + xiii pp. Thomas Schlereth. Artifacts and the American Past. Nashville : American Association for State and Local History, 1980. 294 pp. Thomas Schlereth, ed. Material Culture Studies in America. Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1982.419 + xvi pp. From the perspective of historians of the modern world, there has been a notable enlargement in the subject matter or content of historical scholarship over the past several decades, a development frequently commented on but rarely explained in a substantial or satisfying way. References to the "new social history" serve to indicate that professional historians now deal with ordinary people, and not just elites, with the social, cultural, intellectual, religious and economic dimensions of life, and not just the political. The quotation marks reveal something else, however: that such commentators are not at all certain how much is truly new in the great outpouring of articles and monographs that have created an ever widening ambit of res- pectable historical subjects: food, health, popular culture, technology, science, education, women, the family, local communities—the list grows regularly

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