Firstly, I would like to start by saying what cultural history isn’t. Cultural history is not social history, there is overlap but they are distinct from one another. Social history uses social theories to interpret records of the past in those terms and is heavily influenced by Marxism. Cultural history builds on social history in taking an abstract view on the past and often telling history from below.[1] To define cultural history I feel it would be helpful to first define culture, a task not easily done as culture is an elusive word that means many different things depending on context. However, if I were to be so bold as to make an attempt, insofar as it relates to the topic I am covering, culture is the concepts which bind otherwise disparate individuals into groups with a shared identity. Cultural history seeks to gain some understanding of these concepts, where they come from, how these concepts have influenced the actions of people within those groups and how minority groups within a society have kept their culture alive in order to maintain a distinct identity in an alien, and possibly oppressive, land. Perhaps the earliest form of cultural history would be art history, a distinct discipline in its own right, which seeks to draw conclusions from art about the period.[2] Applying the same process to popular culture is a relatively recent phenomena, as is popular culture itself. For example, Cheryl Deedman uses 19th century literature tailored for and marketed to women to extrapolate conclusions about the lives of women in the period, how they coped with the hardships they faced and what they aspired to. I believe importance of lies in combating essentialism, examining how a concept could be viewed as fundamentally opposed a particular culture when in fact cultures have mixed, influenced, assimilated and been assimilated throughout human existence. Culture is not a rigid thing to be maintained at all costs as many right-wing pundits and politicians would have it but something fluid and ever changing that doesn’t reject outsiders but welcomes them. Cultural history examines how cultures develop over time gathering influence from other culture, from events and from the movement of peoples across the globe, by examining how cultures have changed in the past we resist the narrative that cultures cannot change in the present day.
[1] John Tosh ‘The Pursuit of History’ (New York: Routledge, 2015) p.205
[2] Tosh (2015) p.206
From Local to Global: The History of Music in London Group 2 