Dilemmas and Challenges of Social History since the 1960s: What Comes after the Cultural Turn?1

Abstract

Since the 1960s historians in the English-speaking world have experienced two major waves of innovation, each leading to substantial broadening of the discipline's range of topics, methodologies, and theoretical approaches, linked to particular modes of interdisciplinarity, and energised by the politics of their respective times. Each was moved by a desire for greater democratic inclusiveness, whether in terms of recruitment into the profession, a questioning of older hierarchies of knowledge and institutional structures, or the recognition of previously hidden or marginalised histories. The first of these waves, extending from the 1960s into the early 1980s, involved the popularity and eventual dominance of social history. Beginning at the turn of the 1980s and achieving equivalent influence by the end of the 1990s, a new movement then emerged as the ‘new cultural history’, registering the emergent influence of cultural studies across the humanities and parts of the social sciences, settling increasingly around new histories of gender, race, and sexuality, and responding further to the challenges of postcoloniality. Though marked for some years by great intellectual divisiveness, the lasting impact of the so-called ‘cultural turn’ now allows us usefully to take stock. While taking its stand firmly on the resulting new ground, this article seeks to explore what may have been lost as well as what has been gained.