How and why did the concerns of Annales historians change over time?

How and why did the concerns of Annales historians change over time?

Introduction

The Annales School was developed by a group of French historians associated with historiography during the 20th century and is named after the scholarly journal of Annales d'histoire économique et sociale (which means the yearbook of Economic and Social History). However, the Annales School developed far more than just limiting itself to the economic and the social history. The middle decades of the C20th witnessed the peak of both the impact and the significance of the Annales School and today the journal is popularly referred to as Annales: Economies, Societies and Civilizations. Although various historians tend to restrict the school with the work of the French but in reality it is by no means merely limited or confined to the studies revolving around the history of France.

Furthermore the Annales School is not just a tight knitted group of historians that worked on similar topics using parallel methodology; instead it can rather be depicted as a loose group of historians who worked together since that had similar aims and objectives. Additionally, it is actually the wide range and diversity of the work of these historians within broadly similar aims that in fact makes the Annales historians so important and noteworthy. Some of these include the comparative history or the history of mentalities and the quantitative history. The historians associated with the Annales School also confidently challenged the conventional ideas related to periodization and have written plenty of papers on the problems over the long term. At the same time, these historians also equally insisted on breaking down the barriers that had previously existed between various disciplines such as those including geography and social sciences including sociology, anthropology, economics, and psychology as well as linguistics.

Discussion

The historians associated with the Annales School also confidently challenged the conventional ideas related to periodization and have written plenty of papers on the problems over the long term. At the same time, these historians also equally insisted on breaking down the barriers that had previously existed between various disciplines such as those including geography and social sciences including sociology, anthropology, economics, and psychology as well as linguistics.

Both the historical methods and writings underwent a paradigmatic shift during the 20th century mainly as a result of the group of French scholars which are today universally identified as part of the "Annales school" of historians. This transition noticed within the historical writing seemed to have based around the journal Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale, which was initially founded in 1929 by two prominent professors at the University of Strasbourg namely Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. Soon enough, eminent names such as Braudel, Le Goff and Ladurie became associated with it representing the historical interpretation of the Annales school. Furthermore contemporary scholars such as Hunt and Iggers were focused on restricting the revolutionary ideas of the Annales School to a seemingly more definable school that can be ...