The old traditional school of history was based on the ideas of cause and effect. It used qualitative evidence over the Annales use of quantitative evidence. It focused on what some would call history channel history. It looked at just the exciting parts of history. This is where the Annales fits in. It looks at everything that would affect the daily life of a person. Trevor-Roper explains it the best. He said To recreate the totality of a society, past or present, to understand its delicate mechanism and yet to see it, not as a machine, but as a living organism, with a dynamic of its own, distinct from the mere sum of its parts.
Next is the identification of what it is that distinguishes the Annales school from other varieties of history. First is the scope of the variety. The Annales school, as indicated above, takes the long view of history approach. The historians of the Annales school respect the organic nature of societies, the vitality of man, but they are also rationalists in their method. Annales scholars consider themselves as standing at the vanguard of historical research, and see themselves not as intellectual revolutionaries but as revolutionaries in the realm of intellectual discovery.
The methodology of the Annales is best expressed in the work of Braudel. Braudel wanted was for history to be viewed in a wider canvas in order to produce scientific history. First is the attempt to grasp the totality, and the vital cohesion, of any historical period or society, the conviction that history is what it is through the human life which animates it, the almost Platonic conception of man as the microcosm of the world. According to Harsgor there are 3 methods associated with the Annales. .
The first method is Serialism. It is the use of archival information, chronological lists of prices or demographic material in order to to achieve the greatest possible measure of scientific rigour.