The paper deals with the importance of historicism in modern social science. The social history of cities should clarify the complex interplay between global structural changes and everyday social life. In a way, it is a quintessence of social history. Urban historians are, therefore, encouraged to address the grand problems of social change and to trace the interaction between large-scale shifts in economic organization and urban geography, and changes in the quality of social life. In the paper some of the interactions are listed and briefly analyzed and special attention is paid to the analysis of urban migration. The paper is a transcription of a lecture given by the author in 1991.