In the 1950s Curti undertook a collaborative social history of rural Trempealeau County, Wisconsin using avant-garde quantitative analysis of census records. The book which came out of the project, The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County (1959) immediately became a pioneer work in what would soon be dubbed the "new social history." Curti's wife Margaret Wooster Curti, provided some of the quantitative methodology. Historians, however, did not emulate it, preferring instead to follow Stephan Thernstrom's model in Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century American City (1964), which used a similar methodology of tracking workers through their careers using censuses and city directories. The difference was urban and rural—urban history was exploding and rural history was a backwater; in addition the Thernstrom model was easier to replicate by a graduate student writing a Ph.D. thesis alone (Curti had numerous research assistants and coauthors). Whereas the "old" social history comprised descriptions of everyday lifestyles, perhaps with a coverage of grass roots political movements (like the Populists), Curti's "new" social history was a systematic examination of the entire population using statistics and social science methodologies.
