On Easter Monday, 1615—the seventh day of Passover in 5375 by the Jewish calender — the entire Jewish community of the German city of Worms was sent into exile. But the banishment of the Jews, which followed almost two years of anti-Jewish agitation by the citizens of Worms, was far from permanent.Eight months later, by order of commissioners appointed by the Holy Roman Emperor, the Jews of Worms were permitted to return. They remained in the city for another three centuries, until the final eradication of the Jewish community of Worms in 1942.

As Albert Hirschman has recently observed, critics and advocates of a capitalist, market economy are forever reinventing the wheel, repeating arguments made by their forebears decades and sometimes centuries ago. Take the following observations of a social critic—let his name, for the moment, remain a mystery—as he casts his gaze upon the cultural influence of the market. New forms of capitalist economic organization, he observes, have led to the disappearance of the link between ownership of property and civic responsibility. Men are so involved in acquisition, he laments, that they no longer have time for political concerns and public life. He sees an eclipse of civic virtue, a diminishing willingness to sacrifice private concerns for the public good. Changes in social structure brought about by capitalist development are no less worrisome. The process of the market is leading to the replacement of once-independent producers by men who are mere specialized cogs in a productive machine. The cultural consequences of capitalism are cause for despair. The ever-shifting, international fashions on which the market thrives are destroying authentic, indigenous culture. New forms of capitalist merchandising prosper by arousing novel desires, creating tastes for consumer goods which people do not really need, and leading to excessive expenditure which is bankrupting the economy. Most pernicious are unprecedented marketing techniques which undermine the steadying influence of the family by invading the household itself.

In the past several decades, the scope of European social history has been widened considerably attention given to the historical experience of inarticulate, common folk. By imaginatievly exploring neglected sources and through the use of quantitative techniques, social science historians on both sides of the Atlantic have attempted to systematically weigh hypothesis and evidence in order to recover the texture of past lives. In recent years, however, social science historians who specialize in German history have been confronted by the challenges of Alltagsgeschichte—the history of ordinary events. Using a methodology influenced by anthropology, practitioners of “every-day history” have utilized memoirs, letters, old photos, and interviews with participant observers in order to evoke the past social life of select groups. These scholars have often reported their findings in vivid, detailed narratives in order to avoid forcing the multifaceted experience of ordinary folk into what they consider arid statistical tables and reified constructs, dangers that particularly beset the consumers of computer-generated cross-tabulations and regression equations. In addition, advocates of “peoples' history” have attempted to make historical scholarship unambiguously relevant to contemporary issues by setting their research against a backdrop of current social and political controversy and by espousing “populist” social views.