Page "Annales School" Paragraph 9

The Annales was founded and edited by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929, while they were teaching at the University of Strasbourg and later in Paris.

These authors, the former a medieval historian and the latter an early modernist, quickly became associated with the distinctive Annales approach, which combined geography, history, and the sociological approaches of the Année Sociologique ( many members of which were their colleagues at Strasbourg ) to produce an approach which rejected the predominant emphasis on politics, diplomacy and war of many 19th and early 20th-century historians as spearheaded by historians whom Febvre called Les Sorbonnistes.

Instead, they pioneered an approach to a study of long-term historical structures ( la longue durée ) over events and political transformations.

Geography, material culture, and what later Annalistes called mentalités, or the psychology of the epoch, are also characteristic areas of study.

The goal of the Annales was to undo the work of the Sorbonnistes, to turn French historians away from the narrowly political and diplomatic toward the new vistas in social and economic history.