Cultural history (from the German term Kulturgeschichte), at least in its common definition since the 1970s, often combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. It 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. Anthropology (from the Greek word άνθρωπος, human or person) consists of the study of humanity (see genus Homo). ... For other senses of this word, see history (disambiguation). ... Popular culture, or pop culture, is the vernacular (peoples) culture that prevails in any given society. ... The term history of mentalities is a calque on the French histoire des mentalités (which might also be translated as history of attitudes, history of world-views), a historical movement whose origins are associated with the Annales School. ... The term new history was indebted to the French term nouvelle histoire, itself associated particularly with the historian Jacques Le Goff. ... American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the study of the United States. ...

Most often the focus is on phenomena shared by non-elite groups in a society, such as: carnival, festival, and public rituals; 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. Also examines main historical concepts as power, ideology, class, culture, identity, attitude, race, perception and new historical methods as narration of body. Many studies consider adaptations of traditional culture to mass media (tv, radio, newspapers, magazines, posters, etc.), from print to film and, now, to the Internet (culture of capitalism). Its modern approaches come from art history, annales, marxist school, microhistory and new cultural history. Swabian-Alemannic carnival clowns in Wolfach, Germany A carnival is a public celebration or parade combining some elements of a circus and public street party, generally during the Carnival Season. ... The 2006 Sinulog festival in the Philippines Renaissance festival A festival or fest is an event, usually staged by a local community, which centers on some theme, sometimes on some unique aspect of the community. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Story has several different meaning as outlined below. ... The epic is a broadly defined genre of poetry, and one of the major forms of narrative literature. ... Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix Nationalism is a form of identity that holds that (ethnically or culturally defined) nations are the fundamental units for human social life, and makes certain cultural and political claims based upon that belief; in particular, the claim that the nation is the... Sociologists usually define power as the ability to impose ones will on others, even if those others resist in some way. ... An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. ... Social class refers to the hierarchical distinctions between individuals or groups in societies or cultures. ... The word culture, from the Latin colo, -ere, with its root meaning to cultivate, generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. ... // Computer programming In object-oriented programming, object identity is a mechanism for distinguishing different objects from each other. ... Attitude is a key concept in psychology. ... For other senses of this word, see race (disambiguation). ... PSYCHOLOGY In psychology and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. ... Mass media is a term used to denote, as a class, that section of the media specifically conceived and designed to reach a very large audience (typically at least as large as the whole population of a nation state). ... Printing is an industrial process for reproducing copies of texts and images, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. ... Film refers to the celluloid media on which movies are printed. ... For other uses, see Capitalism (disambiguation). ... This article is about the academic discipline of art history. ... The Annales School is a school of historical writing named after the French scholarly journal Annales dhistoire économique et sociale (later called Annales. ... Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ... Microhistory is a branch of the study of history. ...

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, 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. A touchstone is a small tablet of dark stone such as fieldstone or slate, used for probing of precious metal alloys. ... Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas (born June 18, 1929 in Düsseldorf) is a German philosopher, political scientist and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory, best known for his concept of the public sphere. ... A concept in continental philosophy and critical theory, the public sphere contrasts with the private sphere, and is the part of life in which one is interacting with others and with society at large. ... Clifford James Geertz (born August 23, 1926 in San Francisco) is an American anthropologist serving as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. ... Thick description is a phrase used most famously by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz to describe his own specific mode of practice. ... Memory is the ability of the brain to store, retain, and subsequently recall information. ...

A Vague Example: Historiography and the French Revolution

An area where new-style cultural history is often pointed to as being almost a paradigm 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 characterised as replacing the allegedly dominant, allegedly Marxist, 'social interpretation' which say the causes of the Revolution in class dynamics. The revisionist approach has tended to put more emphasis on 'political culture', and through this the cultural historians have come! 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 ideology in the context of pre-revolutionary French political culture. Since the late 1960s, the word paradigm (IPA: ) has referred to a thought pattern in any scientific discipline or other epistemological context. ... Revisionism is a word which has several meanings. ... Liberty Leading the People, a painting by Delacroix commemorating the July Revolution of 1830 but which has come to be generally accepted as symbolic of French popular uprisings against the monarchy in general and the French Revolution in particular. ... François Furet (27 March 1927 - 12 July 1997) was an influential French historian who attacked the way the French Revolution is interpreted by Marxist historians. ... Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ... A political culture is a distinctive and patterned form of political philosophy that consists of beliefs on how governmental, political, and economic life should to be carried out. ... The word gender describes the state of being male, female, or neither. ... A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value, which is prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of sex A ritual may be performed at regular intervals, or on specific occasions, or at the discretion of individuals or communities. ... An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. ...

Historians who might be grouped under this umbrella are Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, Patrice Higonnet, Lynn Hunt, Keith Baker, Mona Ozouf and Sarah Maza. Of course, these scholars all pursure 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. Robert Darnton (born 1939) is an American cultural historian, recognized as a leading expert on 18th century France. ... Colin Jones (21 March 1959 – ?) was a Welsh welterweight boxer. ... It has been suggested that Modern Times (history) be merged into this article or section. ...

See also

• Cultural studies

Cultural studies combines sociology, social theory, literary theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in industrial societies. ...

References

Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004)

Philippe Poirrier, Les Enjeux de l'histoire culturelle (Paris: Seuil, 2004)

[Category:Culture|History]]