The Lost Synthesis Revisited: The Meaning of "History" Across Four Disciplines, 1976-2025

Nicholas Wilson, Stony Brook University, State University of New York (SUNY)
Damon Mayrl, Colby College

In "History and Sociology: The Lost Synthesis," Andrew Abbott argued that the disciplines of history and sociology failed to achieve interdisciplinary dialog. In this paper, we leverage cutting-edge computational methods to ask an allied question: how does the concept of "history" get deployed both in the four key "social science history" disciplines (History, Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology) and in a key interdisciplinary space (the SSHA's journal, Social Science History). We assemble, process, and evaluate a novel corpus of articles in the flagship journals of each discipline and Social Science History from 1976 to the present.

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 Presented in Session 123. History In/Of Social Science: New Methods and Old Arguments