What is Cultural History? How is it Different from Other Forms of History? Is Cultural History Inferior?

Cultural history asks how human beings make meaning, and how that meaning is carried by symbols, institutions, media, rituals, objects, and everyday habits. It is different from older political history because it does not look only at rulers, events, and official decisions, and it is different from social history because it gives special weight to language, representation, desire, and the symbolic life of ordinary experience. At the same time, the best cultural historians do not treat culture as a decorative afterthought. They argue that culture is one of the principal places where power is formed, contested, naturalised, and hegemonized, whether in film, print, domestic life, consumption, or the language of gender and nation. Seen this way, cultural history is not a lesser form of history, but a more searching one, because it tries to explain how societies imagine themselves into being and how those imaginings become durable social facts. Its misinformed and misled critics sometimes call it vague or overly theoretical. Yet recent reflections suggest that cultural history becomes strongest when it remains tied to evidence, material life, and social structures while still taking meaning seriously. In that balance lies its real strength, and perhaps its highest claim to historical importance.

Cultural history, and therefore cultural historians, are widely and globally recognized. There is also an entire body of work on the very definition of cultural history. This article attempts to lay out the finer points of four such articles.

Study of How Human Beings Become Social Beings

Geoffrey Eley’s illuminative essay, “What Is Cultural History?” (1995) argues that cultural history is not a decorative branch of history concerned only with art, taste, or elite intellectual life. Rather, it is a way of understanding how societies make meaning, produce subjectivity, and organize power through everyday symbols, practices, media, institutions, and habits of thought. The article begins with a dense collage of quotations from Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson, Paul Willis, Judith Williamson, Stuart Hall, and others, and this opening is not accidental. Eley uses these voices to show that “culture” is a contested word, but also one that can be made fruitful when it is understood broadly, as a whole way of life and as a field of symbolic struggle. Culture is therefore not a minor supplement to politics or economics. It is one of the principal sites where social life is formed.

One of Eley’s chief arguments is that cultural history gains force when it is placed in conversation with cultural studies. He treats cultural studies not as a finished doctrine, but as a set of “proposals with which to think.” Its importance lies in the way it shifts attention away from narrow definitions of politics and toward the symbolic forms through which people experience the world. These include film, television, magazines, advertising, fashion, music, popular reading, domestic routines, and consumer practices. Eley emphasises that this field has paid serious attention to popular culture, rather than dismissing it as trivial or degraded. That change matters because everyday cultural life is where many people actually form their sense of themselves, their desires, and their place in society.

The article insists that culture should be understood both as a “way of life” and as a range of artistic and intellectual practices. Eley draws especially on Williams and Hall to argue that culture is interwoven with all social practices. It is not located only in museums, books, or high art. It is also found in habits, language, domestic arrangements, mass entertainment, rituals of identity, and the meanings attached to ordinary objects. This is why cultural history is politically important. If one wants to understand how societies endure or change, one must understand how they make common meanings, and how those meanings become embedded in social forms. A society reproduces itself not only by laws and institutions, but by the taken-for-granted assumptions through which people live.

A major thread in Eley’s article is the critique of the old opposition between “high” and “low” culture. Eley notes that both liberal and socialist traditions often drew a sharp line between refined culture and mass or popular culture, usually treating the latter as vulgar, corrupting, or passive. The social meaning of this distinction was deeply gendered, racialised, and classed. Popular culture was often imagined as a realm of disorder, consumption, leisure, and moral decline, while high culture was identified with discipline, self-improvement, and authority. Eley shows that these distinctions were never politically innocent. They helped regulate who counted as cultured, who counted as dangerous, and which forms of expression were taken seriously. By contrast, cultural history asks us to look at popular culture as a site of creativity, contradiction, and negotiation rather than as mere decline.

This is one of Eley’s most important contributions to the question of social importance. Cultural history matters because it uncovers the ordinary symbolic work through which people cope with social life. Eley draws on writers such as Paul Willis and John Fiske to show how young people, workers, and consumers use available cultural forms to create identity, pleasure, and meaning. This is not a romantic celebration of the popular. Eley is careful to note that domination remains real, and that power structures shape what people can choose, desire, and imagine. Yet he refuses the older assumption that the masses are simply duped. People actively interpret, repurpose, and resist the materials of culture. Cultural history therefore reveals both domination and agency in the same field.

Eley also makes a strong case for the importance of gender in cultural history. Eley argues that the public sphere and the history of politics have often been written in an “impenetrably masculine” way, leaving women’s activity outside the frame. Cultural history helps correct that by showing how femininity and masculinity are produced through public discourse, media, consumption, and social norms. He uses Eve Rosenhaft’s work to suggest that women’s political activity often took place in spaces that older political history failed to recognise, such as welfare, religion, voluntary associations, and social work. Cultural history is therefore critical because it enlarges the archive of the political. It reveals that public life has always been gendered, and that seemingly private forms of conduct may in fact be deeply political.

Another crucial dimension is Eley’s engagement with Foucault. Eley values Foucault because he shifts attention from the state alone to dispersed forms of power, knowledge, discipline, and subject formation. This approach is central to cultural history because it helps explain how people come to think, feel, and act within specific regimes of truth. Culture is not simply what people believe. It is also the field in which belief, normality, identity, and desirability are shaped. Eley’s discussion of ideology follows this line. He criticises older approaches that treated ideology as merely false belief and instead proposes a broader, discursive understanding. Ideology works through ordinary cultural assumptions, and those assumptions are historically produced. Thus cultural history can examine not only explicit doctrines, but the everyday common sense that makes certain social orders appear natural.

Eley’s discussion of Nazism shows why this matters for society at large. Eley argues that a cultural approach can illuminate how destructive political movements grow from deeper social and ideological soils. Nazi power did not emerge from slogans alone. It was made possible by wider cultural formations, including racial science, social policy, gender norms, ideas of health, and forms of public knowledge that predated 1933. Cultural history helps trace these conditions of possibility. It asks how meanings, values, and habits were already in circulation before they were seized by the regime. This is socially critical because it teaches us to look beneath spectacular events and ask how ordinary cultural life can prepare the ground for exclusion, violence, or authoritarianism.

What, then, is cultural history? In Eley’s account, it is the historical study of meaning-making, power, subjectivity, and everyday symbolic life. It looks at how culture operates across institutions, media, consumption, gender, and politics. It rejects the view that culture is secondary to “real” history, and instead shows that culture is one of the means by which reality itself is socially organised. Its critical importance lies in that very insight. A society is not only governed by laws or markets. It is held together, contested, and transformed by stories, images, routines, and forms of recognition. To study cultural history is therefore to study how human beings become social beings, and how societies imagine themselves into being. That is why the article remains valuable. It makes clear that the history of culture is also the history of power, and that understanding this connection is indispensable for any serious account of society.

Cultural History Teaches Historians to See Meaning, Language, Identity

Paula S. Fass’s “Cultural History/Social History: Some Reflections on a Continuing Dialogue” (2003) is a careful, almost self-reflective essay about the relationship between two neighbouring modes of historical writing. Fass does not present cultural history and social history as enemies. She presents them as disciplines that have long corrected one another, borrowed from one another, and occasionally gone astray when they forgot what the other could contribute. Her own position is plainly stated at the outset. She calls herself both a social and cultural historian, but she insists that cultural history, in its newer and more fashionable forms, still needs the ballast, structure, and analytic discipline that social history once supplied. In her view, the dialogue between the two fields had become unbalanced by 2003, and the task was not to abandon cultural history, but to recover some of social history’s steadiness within it.

Fass begins by recalling why cultural history had become so attractive in the first place. Social history, especially in the decades after the 1960s, had broken away from older elite political history and brought ordinary people into view. Yet it had often done so through broad social categories, normal curves, charts, and abstractions that flattened lived experience. Cultural history emerged partly in response to that limitation. It promised greater sensitivity to language, ritual, narrative, symbols, and the uniqueness of individual life. It also promised to take experience seriously in its own terms, rather than always reducing it to class, occupation, or group behaviour. Fass acknowledges these gains and does not wish to surrender them. She notes, however, that the very success of cultural history had produced a new problem. In becoming dominant, it had sometimes moved too far away from the structured inquiry and empirically grounded habits that gave social history its force.

A central concern in Fass is method. She repeatedly contrasts the strengths of social history’s tools with what she sees as the looseness of much cultural history. Social historians, in her account, worked with defined questions, broad bodies of evidence, and a seriousness about comparison and generalisation. They did not simply look for striking examples. They sought to understand patterns of ordinary life. Cultural historians, by contrast, often turned toward liminal experiences, self-fashioning, fluid identity, and the margins of social life. That shift opened fruitful new territory, but it also carried the risk of losing sight of the centre. Fass is especially critical of what she sees as an overreliance on exceptional cases, micro-histories, and theoretically elegant fragments. Such work may be brilliant, but without broader contextual scaffolding it can become analytically thin. She wants cultural history to keep its imaginative energy while regaining a stronger sense of scale, frequency, and social regularity.

This concern becomes especially vivid in her discussion of sexuality. Fass recounts an oral examination in which a talented student, trained in gender and sexuality, could speak knowledgeably about homosexuality and prostitution but had little to say about contraception, marriage, youth, fidelity, or adultery. For her, this was not merely a gap in one student’s preparation. It revealed a wider distortion in cultural history, where the study of sexuality had become increasingly focused on the marginal, the transgressive, and the previously hidden, while the ordinary sexual experiences of most people had dropped out of view. Fass does not deny the importance of marginal subjects. She explicitly says that homosexuality, prostitution, and even sex with children need study. But she insists that historians also need to understand the more common and socially consequential forms of sexual life. The history of sex in everyday life matters at least as much as the history of sex at the edges.

Fass is equally concerned about the way cultural history can blur social difference. She argues that cultural historians, in their effort to escape the determinism of older social history, sometimes speak as though people are simply exposed to broad cultural forces in undifferentiated ways. In doing so, they lose the finer distinctions that social categories once helped historians see. Class, race, gender, and other forms of social location do not disappear simply because theory becomes more sophisticated. Nor should historians assume that self-fashioning is equally available to everyone across time. Fass stresses that people in the past lived under constraints very different from those of the present. Identity may have been more fluid in some contexts than older historians allowed, but it was not infinitely malleable. Cultural history must therefore avoid turning all historical subjects into equally autonomous interpreters of their own lives.

A recurring theme in Fass is the danger of what she sees as analytical fuzziness. She worries that cultural history, intoxicated by theory, can drift toward solipsism, where the historian’s insight rests on a small set of fragments, impressive language, or the individuality of the interpreter rather than on a substantial historical field. She contrasts this with social history’s habit of assembling large bodies of evidence and making clear how conclusions are drawn. This does not mean she wants a return to dry positivism. On the contrary, she values the imagination that cultural history brings. But she insists that imagination must be disciplined. Without that discipline, cultural history can produce elegant readings without enough explanatory power. The historian may dazzle, but not necessarily understand.

One of Fass’s most important contributions is her insistence that the centre still matters. She believes cultural historians have done valuable work in restoring agency, complexity, and subjectivity to historical subjects. Yet she warns that too much attention to liminal or exemplary cases can obscure the experiences of most people. Social history, in her view, remains indispensable because it gives historians ways of understanding groups, patterns, and common life. She praises works such as George Chauncey’s Gay New York precisely because they combine close cultural reading with a broad evidentiary base and a clear sense of social structure. Her point is not that cultural history should become social history again. It is that cultural history should recover some of the empirical width and structural clarity that made social history so persuasive in the first place.

Fass also has an important broader argument about historical knowledge itself. Fass suggests that neither social history nor cultural history should claim total authority. Social history sometimes pretended to a certainty that it could not fully sustain. Cultural history, meanwhile, sometimes responds to that weakness by embracing ambiguity too warmly. Fass wants a middle path. She wants historians to ask sharper questions, define their terms more clearly, and connect micro-analysis with larger social worlds. She argues that historians need imagination, but also limits. They need theory, but also evidence. They need sensitivity to meaning, but also a way of showing how meaning is distributed across actual societies. In short, Fass sees the future of historical writing in a more productive conversation between the two fields rather than in the victory of one over the other.

What gives Fass’s reflection lasting value is its modesty of tone and seriousness of purpose. She does not announce a new manifesto. She asks for balance. She does not reject cultural history. She asks it to remember where it came from and what it too easily forgets. Social history taught historians how to see structures, populations, patterns, and ordinary lives. Cultural history taught historians how to see meaning, language, identity, and the instability of categories. Fass’s argument is that each needs the other. That is why the essay matters. It shows that cultural history becomes socially important when it remains accountable to the larger worlds it claims to interpret. It is strongest when it keeps one eye on symbols and the other on the people who lived among them.

Since People Are Culturally Shaped, Social and Cultural Histories Must be in Dialogue

Richard Grassby’s “Material Culture and Cultural History” (2005) argues that material culture is not a minor branch of history concerned only with pretty objects or curiosities from the past. It is, rather, a rigorous way of understanding how people lived, desired, displayed status, organised domestic life, and made meaning through things. Grassby begins by criticising forms of cultural history that he believes have privileged abstract ideas over things, symbolic interpretation over utility, and representation over actual material experience. In his view, some cultural historians have become too enthralled by images and texts, treating them as if they were self-sufficient sources of meaning and forgetting that goods were also practical objects with weight, cost, use, and circulation. His complaint is not that symbols are unimportant, but that they must not be detached from the physical world in which they operated.

For Grassby, material life was always shaped by culture, but culture itself took form through physical things. He therefore sees material culture as a field that studies artifacts, buildings, household objects, clothing, furniture, and other survivals in order to reconstruct the meanings, habits, and values of past societies. The study of objects, he argues, is not merely antiquarian. It allows historians to recover the textures of everyday life and to see how people used material forms to order their world. This includes the practical side of living, such as food, shelter, comfort, and security, but also the symbolic side, such as taste, display, hierarchy, memory, and identity. Material culture therefore joins utility to meaning rather than separating them.

A major concern in Grassby is evidence. He insists that artifacts must be studied carefully as concrete historical sources rather than as floating symbols. Their size, shape, colour, weight, quality, distribution, and arrangement matter. So do inventories, wills, probate records, archaeological finds, and visual depictions. He stresses that objects can be counted, compared, and classified, but they can also be read. Their arrangement in houses, graves, shops, or wardrobes can reveal social relations and personal habits. Their volume and repetition can show the difference between luxury and necessity. Their location can indicate family structure, status, or patterns of sociability. In this sense, material culture is both quantitative and interpretive. It depends on the hard evidence of things, but also on disciplined inference about what those things meant in lived contexts.

Grassby gives particular attention to the senses and to domestic life. He says that material culture helps historians recover how past people actually experienced their surroundings through sight, touch, smell, texture, and spatial arrangement. Furniture, room layout, clothing, and household objects were not neutral. They organised behaviour and signalled attitudes toward the body, privacy, hierarchy, and display. A chair placed in a certain way or a room arranged in a certain symmetry could create social zones, shape conversation, and express values about rank or decorum. In this way, things were not simply passive possessions. They actively structured social life. That is one of Grassby’s strongest points. Society is not made only through words or institutions. It is also made through the arrangement of objects in space.

A central theme of the essay is consumption. Grassby argues that possessions are rarely important only because they are useful. They matter because people use them to signify status, identity, taste, ambition, and belonging. In early modern England, he suggests, the growing availability of goods created a consumer society in which possession became increasingly tied to social differentiation. Clothing, jewellery, furniture, and decorative objects could function as signals of rank or aspiration. People wanted objects not only to use them, but to display them. The manner of possession was often as important as the fact of possession. Through consumption, people made visible their place in the social order, and sometimes attempted to alter it. Goods therefore had social utility as well as symbolic force.

At the same time, Grassby is careful not to turn material culture into a purely symbolic system. He repeatedly warns against extreme subjectivism. Objects did not possess one timeless meaning, and meanings were never fully fixed. A pearl necklace might signal status, sentiment, family memory, or fashion, depending on context. A painted portrait might be a record of likeness, a statement of prosperity, or a carefully staged performance. There is no foolproof method, he argues, for distinguishing the literal from the emblematic in every case. The world as lived was always more complicated than the world as later interpreted. That is why historical knowledge must remain provisional and empirical. The study of objects can suggest meanings, but those meanings must be tested against context, documents, behaviour, and comparison.

This is where Grassby’s criticism of some cultural theory becomes sharpest. He is suspicious of theoretical language that moves too far from observable evidence. He mocks jargon that sounds detached from the world it claims to explain, and he insists that the road to myth is paved with metaphors. His warning is that scholars can become seduced by interpretation and forget the physical basis of culture. The most productive approach, he says, is to combine written evidence with material evidence, and to use one to check the other. Historians should not choose between theory and empiricism. They should join them. Theories can help make sense of objects, but objects must also correct theories. In this way, material culture becomes a discipline of balance, not of abstraction alone.

Another important argument in Grassby is that material culture reveals inequalities of survival. The objects that remain are often those of the rich, the durable, or the institutional. Cheap, fragile, or everyday items disappear. This means that the historical record is biased, and historians must be aware of that bias. Probate inventories, museum collections, and archaeological finds all preserve certain things and omit others. Grassby therefore urges caution when drawing conclusions from surviving artifacts. The absence of evidence is itself socially structured. To study material culture seriously is to ask not only what survived, but why it survived, and whose lives were therefore more easily recorded than others. This gives the field a broader ethical importance. It makes visible the unevenness of historical memory.

The wider importance of Grassby’s essay lies in its defence of historical realism without crude positivism. He insists that people were culturally shaped but not wholly determined by culture. They acted within material constraints, yet they also interpreted and reworked those constraints. Social history and cultural history, in his account, must remain in dialogue. Material culture offers a way to keep that dialogue grounded. It shows how society is built from the interaction between the symbolic and the practical, the imagined and the tangible, the private and the public. That is why Grassby’s essay remains useful. It reminds historians that things are not just things. They are records of behaviour, clues to social order, and signs of the lived relationships between people and the world they inhabited. To study material culture is therefore to study society in its most concrete form. It is to ask how people made their worlds visible, usable, and meaningful through objects. That is not a side question in history. It is one of its central tasks.

Cultural Histories is One of the Best Ways of Writing History, as it Shows Society Lives in Symbols as Well as Structures

Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter’s “Cultural History: Where It Has Been and Where It Is Going” (2018) is both an account of a field and a quiet argument for why that field still matters. The central claim is that cultural history has never been a narrow study of elite art alone. It has, over the past several decades, widened into an inquiry into meanings, symbols, institutions, media, consumption, and social power. Applegate and Potter begin by tracing that expansion from mid twentieth century cultural history, through the linguistic and semiotic turns of the 1980s and 1990s, to the present moment, when the field must decide whether it will remain a theory heavy enterprise or recover its older commitment to art, music, literature, and other material forms of creative life.

A key idea in Applegate and Potter is that culture is not a decorative extra to historical life. It is one of the main places where social reality is formed. They show how historians and theorists such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, John Fiske, Stuart Hall, and others helped move the field away from a restrictive understanding of “high culture” and toward a broader vision of culture as a way of life. That wider conception included mass media, everyday practices, popular pleasure, and the symbolic work performed by ordinary people. Cultural history, in this sense, became a way of studying how people made meaning in the midst of social inequality, political conflict, and rapid change.

Applegate and Potter are especially interested in the relationship between cultural history and cultural studies. They value the energy that cultural studies brought to questions of power, gender, race, consumption, and the popular, but they also worry that cultural history has sometimes drifted too far from its original materials. In their telling, the field became rich in theory and “turnings” of various kinds, yet less attentive to the traditional domains of art history, music history, theatre, and literary study. They do not wish to dismiss the theoretical gains. Rather, they ask for a return to objects, works, and practices that can be studied through what Geertz called “thick description.” Culture, for Applegate and Potter, should be read in paintings, buildings, symphonies, films, books, and even commercial products, not only in abstract discourse.

This is where their argument becomes especially important for society at large. Applegate and Potter insist that cultural history can reveal the invisible structures through which power operates. They argue that cultural production is not separate from politics but often one of its means. A government’s cultural policy, a wartime mobilisation of symbols, the circulation of national styles, or the organisation of media and institutions can all shape public life profoundly. This is why they discuss the Nazi period at length. They do so not simply to examine propaganda, but to show how the Third Reich built a dense cultural order through institutions such as the Reichskulturkammer. That system blurred the division between high and low culture, and brought together artists, technicians, publishers, and media workers in a single apparatus of control and identity formation. The lesson is sobering. Culture can nourish collective life, but it can also be harnessed to exclusion and domination.

Another major theme in Applegate and Potter is the need to pay attention to material and economic history. They argue that cultural historians have sometimes been too willing to focus on symbolic interpretation while neglecting the practical conditions under which culture is produced and consumed. How much did objects cost? Who paid for them? How were books, porcelain, music, and theatre made, sold, distributed, and financed? These are not side questions. They are central to understanding how culture actually worked. Applegate and Potter point out that business archives, trade journals, balance sheets, and copyright records can reveal the economic life of culture, including the labour, institutions, and infrastructural systems that made artistic production possible. In this respect, cultural history becomes a bridge between symbolism and commerce, imagination and production.

The authors also return repeatedly to the question of popular culture. Here they are careful and balanced. They reject the old assumption that popular culture is automatically inferior or politically empty. At the same time, they warn against treating it as always liberatory or inherently progressive. They see in popular culture a space of real creativity, but also one shaped by mass media, commercial systems, and social hierarchies. This is why they ask historians to study not only great novels and masterpieces but also music halls, magazines, advertising, radios, films, comic books, and consumer goods. Such materials help reconstruct how people lived, desired, and imagined themselves. Society is not shaped only by what it officially prizes. It is also shaped by what it buys, watches, sings, and repeats.

Gender is another large concern in Applegate and Potter’s discussion. They argue that historical writing has often treated politics as masculine by default, while women’s activity was pushed into supposedly private or peripheral spheres. Cultural history, they suggest, can correct this by asking how femininity and masculinity were culturally produced and how women participated in social and political life through institutions such as welfare, religion, association, and media. Their discussion of the “mass” is especially useful here. The term often carried feminised meanings in modern political discourse, and those meanings helped structure the boundaries of citizenship and public legitimacy. Cultural history can therefore reveal how gendered assumptions underlay political culture itself.

What makes Applegate and Potter especially persuasive is their refusal to let cultural history become too abstract, too fashionable, or too detached from lived artefacts. They repeatedly insist that historians should look, listen, count, and compare. They ask scholars to revisit the history of the book, of labour, of urbanisation, of infrastructure, of music, of military culture, and of design. They even suggest that “old fashioned” subjects may be the richest ones for future work, because they contain the material traces of social life in ways that elegant theory sometimes misses. This is not anti theory. It is a plea for thicker, more varied historical practice. Cultural history, they imply, should be interdisciplinary without becoming vague, and theoretically informed without abandoning the archive.

In the end, Applegate and Potter define cultural history as a field that studies how societies make themselves visible and intelligible through objects, practices, meanings, and institutions. Its critical importance lies in the fact that it lets us see how power operates at the level of everyday life. It helps us understand why certain forms of art are valued, why some people are excluded from public life, how nations imagine themselves, how markets shape desire, and how apparently ordinary things carry deep social meaning. For Applegate and Potter, cultural history is not a supplement to history. It is one of the best ways of writing history at all. It shows that society lives in symbols as well as structures, and that no account of human life is complete unless it can explain both.

Cultural History, With Integrity, Can Do Wonders for Understanding Human Societies

Cultural history is neither an indulgent detour nor a lesser cousin of more “serious” historical forms, but a necessary mode of inquiry into how societies live, think, and reproduce themselves. It reveals that power does not reside only in institutions or laws, but also in meanings, habits, objects, and everyday practices that quietly organise life. At its best, cultural history does not abandon evidence for interpretation, nor does it dissolve reality into symbols. Instead, it holds together the material and the meaningful, the empirical and the imaginative, the structural and the experiential.

The dialogue between cultural and social history, as Fass insists, must remain open, while Grassby reminds us that objects and material life anchor cultural analysis in lived reality. Eley and Applegate and Potter, in turn, show that culture is one of the principal terrains where identities are formed and contested. Cultural history is therefore not inferior, but incomplete only when it forgets its own limits.

When practised with discipline and breadth, cultural offers one of the most compelling ways of understanding how human beings become social beings, and how societies endure, change, and imagine themselves across time.