There's a kind of book that many antiquarian book dealers put in the category Social History simply for want of a better term. I'm thinking here of lineal descendants of such classic works as Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice and History (1935) or Self-Love, David Cole Gordon's study of masturbation (1968): ones that bring a whole book's worth of research and thought to bear on a subject that might at first seem so small, trivial or self-evident as to be unworthy of such overkill -- at least until one actually reads them. I don't know quite why, but in recent times most of these seem to have been published by university presses. Random examples include Hotel: An American History by A.K.