Strengths and Weaknesses of Cultural History

Abstract

Cultural history, like its neighbour discipline cultural studies, has never been so popular, in academic circles and perhaps beyond them as well. Since the year 2000 at least nineteen introductions to the subject were published in eight languages. In the last five years, 2007–11, these introductions include three inGerman, two in Italian, one in English, and one each in French and Romanian. The Reformation and the French Revolution have been approached as cultural movements, while the idea of a cultural revolution has been used to describe changes in both ancient Rome and the Russia of Peter the Great. The so-called ‘new cultural history’ in particular is flourishing in its different forms: the history of the everyday, history of the imagined, the history of the body, the history of material culture, the history of cultural practices, etc. Indeed, almost everything seems to be having its cultural history written these days. To quote once again books published since the year 2007, we can now read cultural histories of alcohol, comics, impotence, insomnia, the night, obesity, the sea, shoplifting, tea, terrorism, widows and wine. Two recent multi-volume collections have been published on the cultural history of animals and of the human body. Some of these books have been written by journalists, others by academic historians. Topics that were once considered part of economic or social history have been colonized by cultural historians, as in the case of the history of consumption. The boom has lasted longer than I expected or – since I should declare a personal interest – even dared to hope in the 1980s. Needless to say, this historiographical trend is part of something much larger. Outside departments of history, the empire of cultural studies continues to expand. There has been a turn from literary to cultural

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