History from below

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History from below is a level of historical narrative which was developed as a result of the Annales School and popularised in the 1960s. This form of social history focuses on the perspectives of ordinary individuals within society as well as individuals and regions that were not previously considered historically important. This includes women and the working class, as well as regions such as India or Africa.

The historian Jim Sharpe, in Peter Burke's book New Perspectives on Historical Writing, warns though that without contextualizing history from below can become a casual definition of isolated cases void of any real significance. Sharpe argues that this form of historical scholarship needs to be concretely linked to its place in history (e.g. its antecedents, consequences, etc) in a manner similar to what anthropologists call "thick description".