Cultural history combines the approaches of
anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...
and
history
History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well ...
to examine
popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. It examines the records and
narrative
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.) or fictional ( fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc. ...
descriptions of past matter, encompassing the continuum of events (occurring in succession and leading from the past to the present and even into the future) about a culture.
Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the
social,
cultural, and
political
Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that stud ...
milieu
The social environment, social context, sociocultural context or milieu refers to the immediate physical and social setting in which people live or in which something happens or develops. It includes the culture that the individual was educate ...
of or relating to
the arts
The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both ...
and manners that a group favors.
Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record of
human societies by denoting the various distinctive ways of living built up by a group of people under consideration. Cultural history involves the aggregate of past cultural activity, such as
ceremony, class in practices, and the interaction with locales.
Description
Many current cultural historians claim it to be a new approach, but cultural history was referred to by nineteenth-century historians such as the Swiss scholar of Renaissance history
Jacob Burckhardt.
Cultural history overlaps in its approaches with the French movements of ''
histoire des mentalités'' (Philippe Poirrier, 2004) and the so-called new history, and in the U.S. it is closely associated with the field of
American studies
American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that examines American literature, history, society, and culture. It traditionally incorporates literary criticism, historiography and critical theory.
Schol ...
. As originally conceived and practiced in the 19th century by Burckhardt, in relation to the
Italian Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance ( it, Rinascimento ) was a period in Italian history covering the 15th and 16th centuries. The period is known for the initial development of the broader Renaissance culture that spread across Europe and marked the trans ...
, cultural history was oriented to the study of a particular historical period in its entirety, with regard not only to its painting, sculpture, and architecture, but to the economic basis underpinning society, and to the social institutions of its daily life. Echoes of Burkhardt's approach in the 20th century can be seen in
Johan Huizinga
Johan Huizinga (; 7 December 1872 – 1 February 1945) was a Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history.
Life
Born in Groningen as the son of Dirk Huizinga, a professor of physiology, and Jacoba Tonkens, who died two y ...
's ''
The Waning of the Middle Ages'' (1919).
Most often the focus is on phenomena shared by non-elite groups in a society, such as:
carnival,
festival
A festival is an event ordinarily celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect or aspects of that community and its religion or cultures. It is often marked as a local or national holiday, mela, or eid. A festival ...
, and public
ritual
A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized ...
s;
performance traditions of
tale,
epic, and other verbal forms; cultural evolutions in human relations (ideas, sciences, arts, techniques); and cultural expressions of social movements such as
nationalism
Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people), Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: The ...
. Cultural history also examines main historical concepts as
power
Power most often refers to:
* Power (physics), meaning "rate of doing work"
** Engine power, the power put out by an engine
** Electric power
* Power (social and political), the ability to influence people or events
** Abusive power
Power may a ...
,
ideology,
class,
culture
Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups ...
,
cultural identity,
attitude,
race
Race, RACE or "The Race" may refer to:
* Race (biology), an informal taxonomic classification within a species, generally within a sub-species
* Race (human categorization), classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, and/or s ...
,
perception and new historical methods as narration of body. Many studies consider adaptations of traditional culture to
mass media
Mass media refers to a diverse array of media technologies that reach a large audience via mass communication. The technologies through which this communication takes place include a variety of outlets.
Broadcast media transmit informati ...
(television, radio, newspapers, magazines, posters, etc.), from
print to
film and, now, to the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
(culture of
capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, priva ...
). Its modern approaches come from
art history,
Annales
Annals are a concise form of historical writing which record events chronologically, year by year. The equivalent word in Latin and French is ''annales'', which is used untranslated in English in various contexts.
List of works with titles contai ...
,
Marxist school,
microhistory Microhistory is a genre of history that focuses on small units of research, such as an event, community, individual or a settlement. In its ambition, however, microhistory can be distinguished from a simple case study insofar as microhistory aspires ...
and new cultural history.
[What Became of Cultural Historicism in the French Reclamation of Strasbourg After World War One? French History and Civilization 5, 2014, 1-15]
Common theoretical
touchstones for recent cultural history have included:
Jürgen Habermas's formulation of the
public sphere
The public sphere (german: Öffentlichkeit) is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. A "Public" is "of or concerning the ...
in ''The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere'';
Clifford Geertz's notion of '
thick description
In the social sciences and related fields, a thick description is a description of human social action that describes not just physical behaviors, but their context as interpreted by the actors as well, so that it can be better understood by an o ...
' (expounded in, for example, ''The Interpretation of Cultures''); and the idea of
memory as a cultural-historical category, as discussed in
Paul Connerton's ''How Societies Remember''.
Historiography and the French Revolution
The area where new-style cultural history is often pointed to as being almost a
paradigm is the "
revisionist" history of the
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799. Many of its ...
, dated somewhere since
François Furet
François Furet (; 27 March 1927 – 12 July 1997) was a French historian and president of the Saint-Simon Foundation, best known for his books on the French Revolution. From 1985 to 1997, Furet was a professor of French history at the University ...
's massively influential 1978 essay ''Interpreting the French Revolution''. The "revisionist interpretation" is often characterized as replacing the allegedly dominant, allegedly
Marxist, "social interpretation" which locates the causes of the Revolution in class dynamics. The revisionist approach has tended to put more emphasis on "
political culture". Reading ideas of political culture through Habermas' conception of the public sphere, historians of the Revolution in the past few decades have looked at the role and position of cultural themes such as
gender,
ritual
A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized ...
, and
ideology in the context of pre-revolutionary French political culture.
Historians who might be grouped under this umbrella are
Roger Chartier,
Robert Darnton,
Patrice Higonnet,
Lynn Hunt
Lynn Avery Hunt (born November 16, 1945) is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her area of expertise is the French Revolution, but she is also well known for her work in European cu ...
, Keith Baker, Joan Landes, Mona Ozouf, and
Sarah Maza. Of course, these scholars all pursue fairly diverse interests, and perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on the paradigmatic nature of the new history of the French Revolution. Colin Jones, for example, is no stranger to cultural history,
Habermas, or Marxism, and has persistently argued that the Marxist interpretation is not dead, but can be revivified; after all, Habermas' logic was heavily indebted to a Marxist understanding. Meanwhile, Rebecca Spang has also recently argued that for all its emphasis on difference and newness, the 'revisionist' approach retains the idea of the French Revolution as a watershed in the history of (so-called)
modernity
Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period (the modern era) and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissancein the "Age of Reas ...
and that the problematic notion of modernity has itself attracted scant attention.
Cultural studies
''
Cultural studies'' is an academic discipline popular among a diverse group of scholars. It combines
political economy,
geography
Geography (from Greek: , ''geographia''. Combination of Greek words ‘Geo’ (The Earth) and ‘Graphien’ (to describe), literally "earth description") is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, an ...
,
sociology
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...
,
social theory
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena.Seidman, S., 2016. Contested knowledge: Social theory today. John Wiley & Sons. A tool used by social scientists, social theories rel ...
,
literary theory,
film/video studies,
cultural anthropology,
philosophy, and
art history/
criticism to study
cultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of
ideology,
nationality,
ethnicity,
social class, and/or
gender. The term was coined by
Richard Hoggart
Herbert Richard Hoggart (24 September 1918 – 10 April 2014) was a British academic whose career covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with emphasis on British popular culture.
Early life
Hoggart was bor ...
in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
Center or centre may refer to:
Mathematics
*Center (geometry), the middle of an object
* Center (algebra), used in various contexts
** Center (group theory)
** Center (ring theory)
* Graph center, the set of all vertices of minimum eccentricit ...
. It has since become strongly associated with
Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director.
Cultural history in popular culture
The
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
has produced and broadcast a number of educational television programmes on different aspects of human cultural history: in 1969 ''
''.
* Arcangeli, Alessandro. (2011) ''Cultural History: A Concise Introduction'' (Routledge, 2011)
*
. (2004). ''What is Cultural History?''. Cambridge: Polity Press.
* Cook, James W., et al. ''The Cultural Turn in U. S. History: Past, Present, and Future'' (2009
14 topical essays by scholars
* Ginzburg "challenges us all to retrieve a cultural and social world that more conventional history does not record." -Back Cover
* Green, Anna. (2008). ''Cultural History''. Theory and History. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
* Hérubel, Jean-Pierre V.M. (2010, January). "Observations on an Emergent Specialization: Contemporary French Cultural History. Significance for Scholarship." ''Journal of Scholarly Publishing'' 41#2 pp. 216–240.
* Kelly, Michael. "Le regard de l’étranger: What French cultural studies bring to French cultural history." ''French Cultural Studies'' (2014) 25#3-4 pp: 253-261.
* Kırlı, Cengiz. "From Economic History to Cultural History in Ottoman Studies." ''International Journal of Middle East Studies'' (2014) 46#2 pp: 376-378.
* Laqueur, Walter, ed. ''Weimar: A cultural history'' (Routledge, 2017); Germany in 1920s.
* McCaffery, Peter Gabriel, and Ben Marsden, eds. ''The Cultural History Reader'' (Routledge, 2014)
* Melching, W., & Velema, W. (1994). ''Main trends in cultural history: ten essays''. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
* Moore, Alison M
''Cosmos & History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy'', 12 (1), February 2016, 257-291.
* Moore, Alison, "What Became of Cultural Historicism in the French Reclamation of Strasbourg After World War One?" ''French History and Civilization'' 5, 2014, 1-15
* Morris, I. ''Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece''. (Blackwell Publishing, 1999).
* Munslow, Alun. ''Deconstructing History''. (Routledge, 1997).
* Picón-Salas, Mariano. ''A cultural history of Spanish America'' (U of California Press, 2020).
* Poirrier, Philippe (2004), Les Enjeux de l’histoire culturelle, Seuil.
* Poster, M. (1997). ''Cultural history and postmodernity: disciplinary readings and challenges''. New York: Columbia University Press.
* Rickard, John. ''Australia: A cultural history'' (Monash University Publishing, 2017).
* Rietbergen, Peter. ''Europe: a cultural history'' (Routledge, 2020).
* Ritter, H. ''Dictionary of concepts in history''. (Greenwood Press, 1986)
* Salmi, H. "Cultural History, the Possible, and the Principle of Plenitude." ''History and Theory'' 50 (May 2011), 171-187.
* Schlereth, T. J. ''Cultural history and material culture: everyday life, landscapes, museums. American material culture and folklife''. (Ann Arbor, Mich: UMI Research Press, 1990).
* Schwarz, Georg, ''Kulturexperimente im Altertum'', Berlin: SI Symposion, 2010.
* Spang, Rebecca. (2008). "Paradigms and Paranoia: how modern is the French Revolution?" ''American Historical Review''
* Van Young, Eric. "The New Cultural History Comes to Old Mexico." in ''Writing Mexican History'' (Stanford UP, 2020) pp. 223-264.