Almost 30 years have passed since the “new” social history and its related fields fired the imagination of historians and other social scientists, particularly sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. Perhaps the time has come to ask: What difference does it make? What has been the impact of these new historical efforts on our understanding of more general patterns in history?

The new social history and its subdisciplines have become so established that they are not viewed as new anymore. Younger generations of scholars take them for granted. On the other hand, those of us who witnessed their emergence and helped develop them still remember the sense of promise and discovery and the frantic search for methodologies with which to answer new questions. The excitement led to collaborations and to an enduring sense of kinship among practitioners.

Much of what is known about how Appalachians cope with chronic poverty is the result of the landmark Beech Creek studies, a series of investigations of an impoverished, geographically isolated group of neighborhoods in eastern Kentucky (Brown 1952a, 1952b, 1988 [1950]; Schwarzweller et al. 1971; McCoy 1986). In 1942 James Brown purposefully selected a remote, nonmining area in rural Clay County, Kentucky, to document a way of life that was less deeply affected by the penetration of commodity, labor, and consumer markets than were Appalachian coalfield communities at the time. Brown’s detailed ethnographic observations of subsistence farming, social stratification, and family and community life, together with subsequent studies of residents and out-migrants from Beech Creek, provide the best empirical record of the strategies by which Appalachian persisters and migrants have coped with chronic, intergenerational poverty.

Recent comparative studies in Western industrialization have discovered a variety of economic “governance structures” between competitive markets and corporate hierarchies. Such “associative” forms of enterprise pose both a descriptive and an evaluative problem to students of capitalist development. Can business cooperate, or does a single competitor who hopes to do better by cheating undermine all associative agreements? Suppose cooperation is possible: can it be accomplished to improve products and production processes, rather than merely to redistribute wealth from consumers to business?

For an industrial worker in late-nineteenth-century America who lost a limb or an eye from a precariously assembled piece of machinery or who suffered some other work injury, compensation could be attained only through litigation. But under the common law, the courts assumed that workers who found themselves in dangerous work situations had the freedom to leave and find employment elsewhere. If they chose not to leave and were injured, the employer was not to blame legally. The doctrine of “assumed risk,” one of three “employers’ defenses,” made it difficult for a worker to win compensation. Only when an injured worker could prove that the employer had directly caused the accident and had done so alone was payment awarded (Downey 1912: 11–13).

Two major transitions in U.S. household structure involving the living arrangements of the elderly have taken place over the last two centuries. The first transition, around 1820, marked the demise of the colonial household economy and the rise of a privatized household economy (Degler 1980; Demos 1986; Lasch 1977; Ruggles 1987; Rutman 1977; Ryan 1981). The old tended to share households with the nonold after this time, and the prevalence of coresidence peaked at the turn of the twentieth century (Ruggles 1987). The second shift, around the late 1940s, marked a quiet “demographic revolution” in living arrangements (Smith 1986). It brought a rapid decline in intergenerational coresidence and a parallel rise in young adults and the elderly living as primary individuals.