1. Learning to be a Historian Week 3 History comes in all shapes and sizes (Mapping the field)

2. 1. What different types of history are there?
2. What is interdisciplinarity?
3.Case study: The Hearth Tax
4.How do different types of history impact on how the past is examined

3. What different types of history are there? Political history
Concerned with the formal organisation of power in society
Tended to dominate up until the early C20th
Can include elements of nationalism, international relations, world history
Tendency to be evolutionary history; ‘Whig interpretation’ being one example

4. What different types of history are there? Economic history
Concerned with reconstructing production, exchange and consumption
• Gained support due to contemporary resonance
• Also, could be closely related to political history as initially concerned with economic policy
• More modern economic history looks more to businesses or economic growth

5. What different types of history are there? Social history
• Initially concerned with social ‘problems’ more than society itself
• Also often initially defined by what it didn’t include (i.e. politics and economics) rather than what it did
• Social history tended to focus on the labouring classes and then the working classes and their ‘from below’ perspective
• More modern social history is, essentially, the history of social structure and social relationships

6. What is interdisciplinarity?
Interdisciplinary history = the incorporation of methods and ideas from other disciplines.
These might include: sociology, geography, anthropology, psychology, political science, art and architecture, economics, education.
Origins of interdisciplinarity = French Annales school, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre
The Annales moved the study of history into entirely new areas

7. What is interdisciplinarity
What is interdisciplinarity? Interdisciplinarity provides historians with a wealth of new tools with which to approach history – for example... Documentary Evidence: Historical documents remain static and unchanging, always providing the same basic information. Historians need to employ different ways of approaching and understanding them to continue using them constructively. Let’s look at a case study...

8. The Hearth Tax: levied between 1662 & 1689
Householders paid 2s per year for every
fireplace (hearth) in the property

9. Pre 1980s: approaches to the hearth tax
Political history: importance of the hearth tax in relation to the Restoration (1660) and the Stuart state
Economic history: Taxation, treasury income, national accounting
Economic and political history: relationships between the Crown, the state and the treasury income
Demography: = Interested in population figures

10. Post 1980s: approaches to the hearth tax
Prof. Margaret Spufford = interdisciplinary approaches to the hearth tax
Approaches
Social History: the people, their lives and their communities
Cultural History: the houses they lived in, things they did Material History: the way they lived, the things they owned
Interdisciplinarity
Economics: analysis of relative wealth and poverty
Geography: distributions of wealth and poverty
Architecture: developments in housing design and use Sociology: communities, relationship, migration
Political science: power structures, landlords, influence

11. How do different types of history impact on how the past is examined?
Interdisciplinarity widens the field and provides historians with a greater range of options Interdisciplinarity allows documents and perspectives to be re-evaluated or approached differently Different types of history focus on different elements of the past and new approaches reveal new focuses What might the drawbacks be? What problems does Interdisciplinarity present? When might it not be suitable?