| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Miles Fairburn. Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods. New York: St. Martin's. 1999. Pp. viii, 325. Cloth $59.95, paper $21.95.

This is a text of considerable utility. Few historians take the time to reflect on method in historical practice, to locate specific interpretive dilemmas and the ways in which we can resolve them. Miles Fairburn has done so. The result is a rational progression through some specific problems of historical analysis. 1

The strengths of this book are its detailing of seven problems facing all historians: how to address a past holistically, given the inevitable process of excluding certain peoples from our accounts and the issue of absent social categories; generalizing from fragmentary evidence; understanding causality; establishing differences and similarities; social constructionism; presentism and appropriate concepts; and evaluating competing explanatory accounts. In discrete discussions of these heuristically separated dilemmas, where the interface of evidence and interpretation is always central, Fairburn presents a three-tiered elaboration. First, he offers an overview of the issue, in which he develops key concepts, bolded in the text and explained in a glossary. Second, a specific related reading of particular historical writing relevant to the problem is provided, be it of Leonore Davidoff's and Catharine Hall's Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (1987) or Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), to name but two of many texts addressed. The purpose of these focused readings is not polemical but pedagogical, albeit in ways that are often too compressed to satisfy those with a deep grasp of the analytic complexity of the writings. Finally, a third concluding section summarizes the discussion, bringing it to a close. . . .

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