The Journal
The journal began in Strasbourg as Annales d'histoire économique et sociale; it moved to Paris and kept the same name from 1929 to 1939. It was successively renamed Annales d'histoire sociale (1939–1942, 1945), Mélanges d'histoire sociale (1942–1944), Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations (1946–1994), and Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (1994– ).
In 1962 Braudel and Gaston Berger used Ford Foundation money and government funds to create a new independent foundation, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme (FMSH), which Braudel directed from 1970 until his death. In 1970 the 6th Section and the Annales relocated to the FMSH building. FMSH set up elaborate international networks to spread the Annales gospel across Europe and the world.
The scope of topics covered by the journal is vast and experimental—there is a search for total history and new approaches. The emphasis is on social history, and very long-term trends, often using quantification and paying special attention to geography and to the intellectual world view of common people, or "mentality" (mentalité). Little attention is paid to political, diplomatic, or military history, or to biographies of famous men. Instead the Annales focused attention on the synthesizing of historical patterns identified from social, economic, and cultural history, statistics, medical reports, family studies, and even psychoanalysis.
Read more about this topic: Annales School
Famous quotes containing the word journal:
“What the Journal posits is not the tragic question, the Madman’s question: “Who am I?”, but the comic question, the Bewildered Man’s question: “Am I?” A comic—a comedian, that’s what the Journal keeper is.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“Unfortunately, many things have been omitted which should have been recorded in our journal; for though we made it a rule to set down all our experiences therein, yet such a resolution is very hard to keep, for the important experience rarely allows us to remember such obligations, and so indifferent things get recorded, while that is frequently neglected. It is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time, because to write it is not what interests us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)