Introduction: Cultural History in the United States: Past, Present and Future Trajectories

Abstract

This special issue of Cultural History focuses on the past, present and future trajectories of cultural history in the United States. In the American academy, cultural history has enjoyed a relatively long, creative and insightful tradition. Since the early twentieth century, practitioners of cultural history in the United States have been, and remain, self-consciously interdisciplinary in their approach to historical research and writing. This tradition of interdisciplinarity, and the concomitant questioning of what constitutes legitimate historical evidence (something particularly evident among ethnohistorians and historians of race, gender, and sexuality), has produced a vast and vibrant historiography that analyses everything from comic books and wrestling to politics and political economy. The methodological agility that is now a hallmark of American cultural history writing prompted cultural historians James Cook and Lawrence Glickman to observe in 2008 that there exists no ‘fixed or finished method for “doing” cultural history’. Indeed, the volume and breadth of monographs and scholarly essays devoted to the cultural history of the United States suggests that the cultural turn of the 1970s and 1980s has seemingly triumphed among American historians and become so commonplace that it is no longer possible to do justice to the political, economic, diplomatic or social histories of the United States without being at least minimally literate in the methods of the cultural historian(s). Thus, while porous disciplinary boundaries may cause heart palpitations among purists who prefer to see political or economic history as discrete methodological approaches to understanding the past, the reality is