Cultural History/Social History: Some Reflections on a Continuing Dialogue (The Cultural Turn and Beyond‪)‬

Social and cultural history have always been related to each other in strategic ways, correcting each other's blindspots and blunders, while they have also emphasized different elements of the past and pursued different methods. When I first started graduate studies thirty-five years ago, I was interested in culture, but found myself pulled toward social history, not only because it was fashionable, but because it seemed to provide my thinking with a certain ballast and my research with an effective structure which I found beneficial. I never gave up my interest in matters relating to culture, and I never accepted all behavioral tenets of social history, but I elected to allow its disciplining hand to help me to fashion better questions and more systematic strategies for engaging the past. Over the last twenty years, as cultural history has overtaken social history in "fashionableness" to become what Lynn Hunt has described as well-nigh hegemonic, I think that the elements of ballast, clarity and structure that I first found so attractive in social history have become ever more urgently needed in the cultural/social history now being practiced. Now, more than ever, cultural history needs exposure to the methods, ways of thinking and questions that social history can provide. Therefore, I still call myself a social and cultural historian and encourage my students to engage the issues of culture with which they are now primarily concerned with tools and perspectives drawn from social history. The emergence of cultural history in the 1970s and 1980s and its subsequent dominance was in part a response to the perceived limitations of the social history perspective of the previous historiography. In describing the behavioral tendencies of social groups and emphasizing normative behavior, often in the abstractions of numbers and charts, social historians had moved beyond an elite-dominated political paradigm, but had ignored both the uniqueness of individual experience and the ways in which social life is created through politics and culture. And their attachment to group categories and social structural explanations had begun to deaden history as an exploration of contingent experience. Cultural historians sought to bring some life back into the exploration of the lives of ordinary people and to open them up to arenas of freedom and choice. By the mid 1980s, cultural historians were drawing upon beliefs about the agency of ordinary people that social historians such as Herbert Gutman and Eugene Genovese had emphasized, but drew away from the way agency was attributed to participation in predefined group activities. (1) Increasingly, cultural historians looked to what anthropologists called "liminal" experiences, and to adopt the "post-modern" perspective on identity as fluid and changing. As social historians played into the politics of identity of the 1980s, cultural historians turned to deconstructing identity altogether, and attributing to the past some of the willfulness of contemporary culture. (2) In addition, not only was the articulateness of the subjects pursued by social historians usually quite limited but literary sources had taken second place to numbers. Cultural historians, in contrast, put their faith in a fuller exploration of language and because, in their view, all culture is connected, all forms of articulation could be examined as exemplary.