The New Cultural History: Volume 6

In the book The New Cultural History, editor Lynn Hunt has compiled a series of essays that seek to explain cultural history, as well as essays that undertake the approach to history that is exemplified in cultural history. Each essay is by a cultural historian of some degree, and each excerpt builds upon and carries out the notion of cultural history itself. Instead of one long discussion about what is cultural history, this volume effectively translates the aspects of cultural history for the reader by offering various examples of how cultural historians write. The first half of the book is devoted to "models of cultural history," and it offers just that. In her essay on Michel Foucault, Patricia O'Brien gives the reader a better understanding of cultural history through the works and visions of the famous French philosopher. She argues that Foucault's approach to historical discourse paved the way for historians to be able to draw on interpretations of facts rather than just the facts alone. Suzanne Desan, in her essay, shows how this historical method was employed by more contemporary historians such as E.P. Thompson and Natalie Davis. Through their work the reader sees how they moved from a socioeconomic, Marxist view of history to one that was outlined by Foucault. Though Desan is writing a history, she is also doing what her subjects did and draws her own interpretations and finally, calls for a merge between social and cultural history. Aletta Biersack and Lloyd S. Kramer both take this new cultural history as a model, and in their respective essays discuss how anthropology and literature offer invaluable insights into the psychology of culture of the masses. Once the model for cultural history is established, part two of The New Cultural History shows how use of philosophy, psychology, literature, and anthropology are used when discussing histories of various institutions. In her essay on the American Parade, Mary Ryan gives a more thorough history of an American custom by limiting the scope of her topic to three cities and a very concentrated period of time. She is then more able to draw interpretations of what the American parade has meant and through her findings, gives credence to her own hypothesis that the parade has mirrored the rise and fall of various social groups. In "Texts, Printing, Readings" author Roger Chartier looks at the text of creating text itself as a clue into how society reads and why, and through drawing his own interpretations he gives a voice to the readers in the past, and in a sense, gives ammunition for social historians who argue that there is a power relationship between printing and the masses. Thomas W. Laquer shows how this "ammunition" for social historians was further realized through narratives about human suffering in his article "Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative." In the final essay, Randolph Starn draws on science to explain how art was created and perceived during th