Cultural history
Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the
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.[1]
Cultural history overlaps in its approaches with the French movements of
Most often the focus is on phenomena shared by non-elite groups in a society, such as:
Common theoretical touchstones for recent cultural history have included: Jürgen Habermas's formulation of the public sphere in The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere; Clifford Geertz's notion of 'thick description' (expounded in 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
Historians who might be grouped under this umbrella are Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, Patrice Higonnet, Lynn Hunt, 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 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, sociology, social theory, 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 in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director.
Cultural history in popular culture
The BBC has produced and broadcast a number of educational television programmes on different aspects of human cultural history: in 1969 Civilisation, in 1973 The Ascent of Man, in 1985 The Triumph of the West and in 2012 Andrew Marr's History of the World.
See also
References
- ^ "Historicising Historical Theory's History of Cultural Historiography" Archived 2020-11-26 at the Wayback Machine. Alison M. Moore, Cosmos & History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 12 (1), February 2016, 257-291.
- Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (6th ed.), p 3.
- .
- ^ What Became of Cultural Historicism in the French Reclamation of Strasbourg After World War One? French History and Civilization 5, 2014, 1-15
Further reading
- Arcangeli, Alessandro. (2011) Cultural History: A Concise Introduction (Routledge, 2011)
- Burke, Peter. (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) excerpt; 14 topical essays by scholars
- ISBN 978-0-8018-4388-4. 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. "Historicising Historical Theory's History of Cultural Historiography" Archived 2020-11-26 at the Wayback Machine. 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). ISBN 0-415-13192-8.
- 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, in JSTOR
- Van Young, Eric. "The New Cultural History Comes to Old Mexico." in Writing Mexican History (Stanford UP, 2020) pp. 223–264.