Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales


Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales is a French academic journal covering social history that was established in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. The journal gave rise to an approach to history known as the Annales School. 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, Mélanges d'histoire sociale, Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations, and, finally, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales in 1994. In 2013 it began publication of an English language edition, with all the articles translated.
The scope of topics covered by the journal is wide but the emphasis is on social history and long-term trends, often using quantification and paying special attention to geography and to the intellectual world view of common people, or "mentality". Less 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. It is one of the main French outlets for research in historical anthropology.
In 2017 the EHESS formed a partnership with Cambridge University Press to publish both the French and English editions of the Annales. The English language edition has been published since 2012, carrying English translations of the original French articles.