The Annales school is (was) a prominent French school of historical theory centered around its journal, Annales. The Annales school was the most popular approach to history in the French, and to a lesser extent American, academy from the 1950s to the 1970s, and it has left a substantial legacy. The most famous Annalists are Marc Bloch, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jacques Le Goff, Georges Duby, and most of all Fernand Braudel.

The Annales school, particularly in the 50s and 60s, was centered around what they called the history of the longue durée, i.e. looking at slow change over time. Annales history focused on non-human factors - climate, broad economic trends, etc. - and how they dictated the course of history. The most representative work of this period is Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II.

In the 70s, the Annalists focused on smaller scale studies of culture and mentalité, their term for a sort of collective mindset of a historical milieu, with mixed success, such as Ladurie's Montaillou.

With the material turn in the early 80s, Annales history has slowly fell out of favor. Le Goff's death just the other year marked the passing of the last of the great Annalists.

This is a fairly dated article, but for more see: Hunt, L. “French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm.” Journal of Contemporary History 21, no. 2 (1986): 209–24.