Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through thesocial,cultural, andpoliticalmilieu of or relating tothe arts and manners that a group favors.Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record ofhuman 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 asceremony, class in practices, and the interaction with locales.[1] It combines the approaches ofanthropology andhistory to examinepopular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience.
Many current cultural historians claim it to be a new approach, but cultural history was already referred to by nineteenth-century historians, notably the Swiss scholar of Renaissance historyJacob Burckhardt.[2]
Cultural history overlaps in its approaches with the French movements ofhistoire des mentalités (Philippe Poirrier, 2004) and the so-called new history, and in the U.S. it is closely associated with the field ofAmerican studies. As originally conceived and practiced in the 19th century by Burckhardt, in relation to theItalian 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.[3] Echoes of Burkhardt's approach in the 20th century can be seen inJohan Huizinga'sThe Waning of the Middle Ages (1919).[4]
Most often the focus is on phenomena shared by non-elite groups in a society, such as:carnival,festival, and publicrituals;performance traditions oftale,epic, and other verbal forms; cultural evolutions in human relations (ideas, sciences, arts, techniques); and cultural expressions of social movements such asnationalism. Cultural history also examines main historical concepts aspower,ideology,class,culture,cultural identity,attitude,race,perception and new historical methods as narration of body. Many studies consider adaptations of traditional culture tomass media (television, radio, newspapers, magazines, posters, etc.), fromprint tofilm and, now, to theInternet (culture ofcapitalism). Its modern approaches come fromart history,Annales,Marxist school,microhistory and new cultural history.[5]
Common theoreticaltouchstones for recent cultural history have included:Jürgen Habermas's formulation of thepublic sphere inThe Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere;Clifford Geertz's notion of 'thick description' (expounded inThe Interpretation of Cultures); and the idea ofmemory as a cultural-historical category, as discussed inPaul Connerton'sHow Societies Remember.
The area where new-style cultural history is often pointed to as being almost aparadigm is the "revisionist" history of theFrench Revolution, dated somewhere sinceFrançois Furet's massively influential 1978 essayInterpreting the French Revolution. The "revisionist interpretation" is often characterized as replacing the allegedly dominant, allegedlyMarxist, "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 asgender,ritual, andideology in the context of pre-revolutionary French political culture.[citation needed]
Historians who might be grouped under this umbrella areRoger Chartier,Robert Darnton,Patrice Higonnet,Lynn Hunt, Keith Baker, Joan Landes, Mona Ozouf, andSarah 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.[citation needed]
Cultural studies is an academic discipline popular among a diverse group of scholars. It combinespolitical economy,geography,sociology,social theory,literary theory,film/video studies,cultural anthropology,philosophy, andart history/criticism to studycultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters ofideology,nationality,ethnicity,social class, and/orgender. The term was coined byRichard Hoggart in 1964 when he founded the BirminghamCentre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It has since become strongly associated withStuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director.[citation needed]
TheBBC has produced and broadcast a number of educational television programmes on different aspects of human cultural history: in 1969Civilisation, in 1973The Ascent of Man, in 1985The Triumph of the West and in 2012Andrew Marr's History of the World.
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