Overview

There is at the present time no general collection of readings on cultural history, yet historians and practitioners of related disciplines have over the past few years devoted a large amount of attention to the challenge of placing cultural continuity and change in the foreground of their efforts to understand the past. The Cultural History Reader aims to provide a survey of texts both about cultural history to put these developments in context and texts which form the basis of this cultural history. Consisting of 12 parts, a Prologue and an Epilogue, each section also has a contextualising introduction to ground the individual chapters and position them within the development of Cultural History. The Prologue defines Cultural History and sketches its recent development and its antecedents, and focuses on a number of important contributors to the Cultural History debate, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Burke, Natalie Zemon Davis, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz and Lynn Hunt. The sections focus on subjects important in the development of cultural history and provide examples of good cultural history, preceded by remarks on the ways in which the theme has been handled by different cultural historians. The themes of the eleven sections are: oral and literate cultures; culture and technology; space, time and measurement; work and commerce; religion; childhood; gender; individuality; popular culture; cross-cultural encounters; and war. Throughout these introductory sections and the chosen extracts themselves, The Cultural History Reader demonstrates the distinctive contributions made by cultural historians to the range of historiographical methods and illustrates the insights to be gained from analyses of how cultural factors have shaped people's experience of the world and guided their actions. An essentail resource for students of cultural history.

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9780415520430

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Reviews

'Both students and teachers of cultural history should welcome this wide-ranging collection of exemplary studies, including its lucid and perceptive introduction' Peter Burke, University of Cambridge, UK

'Both students and teachers of cultural history should welcome this wide-ranging collection of exemplary studies, including its lucid and perceptive introduction.' Peter Burke, University of Cambridge, UK

Author Information

Peter McCaffery taught Sociology and Cultural History in the University of Aberdeen. His publications include Midwifery and the Medicalization of Childbirth, edited with Edwin van Teijlingen, George Lowis and Maureen Porter (2000). He is interested in problems of interdisciplinary collaboration, both in research and in professional practice Ben Marsden is Director of the Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Aberdeen. He has been involved in the teaching of cultural history, especially of science and technology, since 1992. His books include Watt’s Perfect Engine: Steam and the Age of Invention (2002), Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain with Crosbie Smith (2005), and Uncommon Contexts: Encounters between Science and Literature, 1800-1914 edited with Ralph O’Connor and Hazel Hutchison (2013).

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