It would be lovely if there was one concise definition of social history that all active social historians would agree to use - sadly there isn't. The attraction of social history to a collector-classifier such as me is that the breath of the subject is so wide and the number of primary sources is so large that it is a simple task to find a topic that hasn't been studied before. What can be more problematic is gaining access to the information required to conduct meaningful research. It is hard to underestimate the impact that the increasing availability of on-line newspaper archives will have on social historians. Almost every page of almost every newspaper contains such a diversity of material that it is a very strong willed researcher who can resist the temptation to read articles that are of no direct relevance to the project the researcher is currently undertaking. My first degree was in food technology and so it was almost inevitable that my first foray into the social history of the United States of America would look at agricultural adverts.