Data sources

Census Census A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common... es Uniform Crime Reports Uniform Crime Reports The Uniform Crime Reports are published by the United States Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reporting Program... Letters Diaries Diary A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone... Autobiographies Autobiography An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:... Baptismal certificates Baptism In Christianity, baptism is for the majority the rite of admission , almost invariably with the use of water, into the Christian Church generally and also membership of a particular church tradition... Death certificate Death certificate The phrase death certificate can describe either a document issued by a medical practitioner certifying the deceased state of a person or popularly to a document issued by a person such as a registrar of vital statistics that declares the date, location and cause of a person's death as later... s Marriage Marriage Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found...  records Birth certificate Birth certificate A birth certificate is a vital record that documents the birth of a child. The term "birth certificate" can refer to either the original document certifying the circumstances of the birth or to a certified copy of or representation of the ensuing registration of that birth... s School School A school is an institution designed for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of formal education, which is commonly compulsory. In these systems, students progress through a series of schools...  records Applications Recommendations Diploma Diploma A diploma is a certificate or deed issued by an educational institution, such as a university, that testifies that the recipient has successfully completed a particular course of study or confers an academic degree. In countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia, the word diploma refers to... s License License The verb license or grant licence means to give permission. The noun license or licence refers to that permission as well as to the document recording that permission.A license may be granted by a party to another party as an element of an agreement... s Certifications Performance evaluation Performance Evaluation Performance Evaluation is an international journal published by Elsevier. The current Editor-in-chief is Philippe Nain. The journal was previously published by North-Holland Publisher.-Editors:*1981–1986 Hisashi Kobayashi*1987–1990 Martin Reiser... s Minutes of meetings Speeches Directories Listings Newspaper Newspaper A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a... s Magazine Magazine Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three... s Book Book A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page... s

Cleometrics is a method

Method

Method may refer to:* Scientific method, a series of steps taken to acquire knowledge* Method , a piece of code associated with a class or object to perform a task...

 of historical inquiry. Pioneered by Marxist historiographers, cleometric history draws on records of comprehensive, primarily numeric, data.

Background

For the most part a doctrinaire approach to the study of history

History

History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

 by Marxist historians has ebbed in its significance. However, growing out of a Marxist approach is an enthusiasm for history as something other than merely the story of elites, or even more narrowly, the story of great men. Therefore, this branch of historiography

Historiography

Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...

 stands in direct contradiction to influential philosopher / historians of the early 19th century like Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life , Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe...

 and Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was...

.

Marxist historians felt obliged to write their histories about the proletariat

Proletariat

The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...

. After all, for Marxists the end point of all previous history would be the proletarian revolution

Proletarian revolution

A proletarian revolution is a social and/or political revolution in which the working class attempts to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Proletarian revolutions are generally advocated by socialists, communists, and most anarchists....

 and an end of all social, political and economic hierarchy. From that point of view the conventional approach of most historians was fast becoming irrelevant.

However, the problem for Marxist historians was how to tell the story of common people. The activities of peasants and plebians were not the subject of conventional source material. Historians like Herodotus

Herodotus

Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...

 didn't describe their exploits, they seldom showed up in literature, and for the most part they left little in the way of their own written record.

Yet Marxist historians believed that such a vital field of study couldn't be left exclusively to archeology and anthropology

Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

. Cleometrics was born out of the Marxist historian's desire for a more prominent role in telling this story. "Cleo" or "Clio

Clio

thumb|Clio—detail from [[The Art of Painting|The Allegory of Painting]] by [[Johannes Vermeer]]In Greek mythology, Clio or Kleio, is the muse of history. Like all the muses, she is a daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne...

" is the name of the Greek muse of history and "metrics" simply stands for measurement. In the absence of rich interpretive sources the history of common folk could be inferred from more pedestrian sources like tax records, census records, baptismal records, agricultural records etc.

One of the great practitioners of this kind of history was the French scholar, Marc Bloch

Marc Bloch

Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian who cofounded the highly influential Annales School of French social history. Bloch was a quintessential modernist. An assimilated Alsatian Jew from an academic family in Paris, he was deeply affected in his youth by the Dreyfus Affair...

. To write his seminal work, "Feudal Society," he combed through feudal records and was able to tell more than anyone might have supposed about the regular and routine affairs of common people.

Marxism may not be as intellectually influential as it once was. However, the use of quantitative source materials and a methodology that relies on measurement and statistical analysis is still an important area of historical study. Cleometrics has been particularly important in relatively new areas of historical research like feminist history and black history where a long tradition of scholarship does not exist.