Cultural history combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. It examines the records and narrative 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 Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human Society, societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, and habits of the ...

, and political milieu of or relating to the arts and manners that a group favors.

Jacob Burckhardt Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (25 May 1818 – 8 August 1897) was a Swiss historian of art and culture and an influential figure in the historiography of both fields. He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history. Sigfri ...

(1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record of

human societies A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societi ...

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 A ceremony (, ) is a unified ritualistic event with a purpose, usually consisting of a number of artistic components, performed on a special occasion. The word may be of Etruscan origin, via the Latin '' caerimonia''. Church and civil (secular) ...

, 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

. Cultural history overlaps in its approaches with the French movements of ''

histoire des mentalités The history of mentalities or ''histoire des mentalités'' ( French; ) is the body of historical works aimed at describing and analyzing the ways in which people of a given time period thought about, interacted with, and classified the world around ...

'' (Philippe Poirrier, 2004) and the so-called new history, and in the U.S. it is closely associated with the field of American studies. As originally conceived and practiced in the 19th century by Burckhardt, in relation to the Italian Renaissance, 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's ''

The Waning of the Middle Ages ''The Autumn of the Middle Ages'', ''The Waning of the Middle Ages'', or ''Autumntide of the Middle Ages'' (published in 1919 as ''Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen'' and translated into English in 1924, German in 1924, and French in 1932), is the best ...

'' (1919). Most often the focus is on phenomena shared by non-elite groups in a society, such as:

carnival Carnival is a Catholic Christian festive season that occurs before the liturgical season of Lent. The main events typically occur during February or early March, during the period historically known as Shrovetide (or Pre-Lent). Carnival typi ...

, festival, and public rituals;

performance A performance is an act of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment. It is also defined as the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function. Management science In the work place ...

traditions of tale,

epic Epic commonly refers to: * Epic poetry, a long narrative poem celebrating heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation * Epic film, a genre of film with heroic elements Epic or EPIC may also refer to: Arts, entertainment, and medi ...

, and other verbal forms; cultural evolutions in human relations (ideas, sciences, arts, techniques); and cultural expressions of social movements such as nationalism. Cultural history also examines main historical concepts as power,

ideology An ideology is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones." Formerly applied pri ...

, class, culture,

cultural identity Cultural identity is a part of a person's identity, or their self-conception and self-perception, and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality or any kind of social group that has its own distinct cultur ...

, attitude, race, perception and new historical methods as narration of body. Many studies consider adaptations of traditional culture to mass media (television, radio, newspapers, magazines, posters, etc.), from

print Printing is the process for reproducing text and images using a master form or template Print or printing may also refer to: Publishing * Canvas print, the result of an image printed onto canvas which is often stretched, or gallery-wrapped, o ...

film A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...

and, now, to the Internet (culture of capitalism). Its modern approaches come from art history, Annales,

Marxist Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

school, microhistory 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

touchstone Touchstone may refer to: * Touchstone (assaying tool), a stone used to identify precious metals * Touchstone (metaphor), a means of assaying relative merits of a concept Entertainment * ''Touchstone'' (album), a 1982 album by Chick Corea * T ...

s for recent cultural history have included:

Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas (, ; ; born 18 June 1929) is a German social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere. Associated with the Frankfurt School, Habermas's wor ...

's formulation of the public sphere in ''The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere'';

Clifford Geertz Clifford James Geertz (; August 23, 1926 – October 30, 2006) was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades. ...

's notion of ' thick description' (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 In science and philosophy, a paradigm () is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. Etymology ''Paradigm'' comes f ...

is the " revisionist" history of the French Revolution, dated somewhere since François Furet's massively influential 1978 essay ''Interpreting the French Revolution''. The "revisionist interpretation" is often characterized as replacing the allegedly dominant, allegedly

, "social interpretation" which locates the causes of the Revolution in class dynamics. The revisionist approach has tended to put more emphasis on "

political culture Political culture describes how culture impacts politics. Every political system is embedded in a particular political culture. Definition Gabriel Almond defines it as "the particular pattern of orientations toward political actions in which ...

". 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, and

in the context of pre-revolutionary French political culture. Historians who might be grouped under this umbrella are Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton,

Patrice Higonnet Patrice Louis René Higonnet (born 3 February 1938) is a French author, historian, and retired professor who currently serves as a Robert Walton Goelet Research Professor of French History at Harvard University. He previously taught European hi ...

, Lynn Hunt, Keith Baker, Joan Landes, Mona Ozouf, and

Sarah Maza Sarah (born Sarai) is a biblical matriarch and prophetess, a major figure in Abrahamic religions. While different Abrahamic faiths portray her differently, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all depict her character similarly, as that of a piou ...

. 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 Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the political dynamics of contemporary culture (including popular culture) and its historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices re ...

'' is an academic discipline popular among a diverse group of scholars. It combines political economy, geography, sociology, social theory,

literary theory Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Culler 1997, p.1 Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, mo ...

, film/video studies,

cultural anthropology Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The portma ...

philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...

, and art history/

criticism Criticism is the construction of a judgement about the negative qualities of someone or something. Criticism can range from impromptu comments to a written detailed response. , ''"the act of giving your opinion or judgment about the good or bad q ...

to study

phenomena in various societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of

, nationality,

ethnicity An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, ...

social class A social class is a grouping of people into a set of Dominance hierarchy, hierarchical social categories, the most common being the Upper class, upper, Middle class, middle and Working class, lower classes. Membership in a social class can for ...

, 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 The Triumph of the West was a thirteen part BBC television series, with an accompanying book, written and presented by John Roberts, historian and Warden of Merton College, Oxford, and first broadcast in 1985. The series was subtitled ''A View of ...

'' and in 2012 '' Andrew Marr's History of the World''.

References

External links

International Society for Cultural History
{{Authority control Cultural history History Fields of history