Part IV: Social History and Audience

Social history has always flourished as a research field, and this will remain true in future. Opportunities to reach wider audiences, in the interests of promoting not just an interest in history but the capacity to apply historical analysis to current issues, have received recurrent attention, and the same holds true for the role of social history in teaching. The challenge, obviously, is to translate truly exciting findings about human behavior into wider public understandings—and the challenge needs to be built into the future of the field.