Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that

looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major
growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well
represented in history departments in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and
the United States. In the two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of
professors of history in American universities identifying with social history
rose from 31% to 41%, while the proportion of political historians fell from
40% to 30%.[1] In the history departments of British and Irish universities in
2014, of the 3410 faculty members reporting, 878 (26%) identified themselves
with social history while political history came next with 841 (25%). [2]
Charles Tilly, one of the best known living social historians, identifies the
tasks of social history as: 1) “documenting large structural changes; 2)
reconstructing the experiences of ordinary people in the course of those
changes; and (3) connecting the two” (1985:p22).