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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2022
The Programa de Estudios de Historia Económica y Social Americana (PEHESA) was established in 1977 in association with the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales sobre el Estado y la Administración (CISEA) by a group of Argentine historians committed to the study of social history. This field has not had too fortunate a fate in our country; political, academic, and institutional reasons have condemned it to the fringe.
Trapped in the nineteenth-century view of the humanities until the 1950s, our academic world produced traditional history based upon empirical study of political events and of the institutional development of the country. With few exceptions, history was the history of great public figures or at best, of successful enterprises carried out by distinguished members of society. Yet historical works were not produced only in the academic world. Ideologues from different sectors of society looked to the past in search of arguments, models, and stereotypes, and although they did not write an alternative history, in some cases they did raise new issues or question old assumptions.