Cultural & Social History

All human beings live in and through culture: the languages, traditions, and practices which create meaning in the world.  Humans are likewise creatures of social order: the roles, institutions, and divisions of labor which define how we relate to one another.  Together, cultural and social history explore the significance of what gets overlooked in state-centered and elitist narratives of the past.  For cultural and social historians, evidence comes in many forms, from the “high” culture of novels, paintings, and operas, to the “popular” culture of rock music and comic books, to the material artifacts of work and domesticity, to the traces of lived experience recorded in letters and diaries.  Challenging the authority of canons and hierarchies, cultural and social historians ask how ideas circulated in various contexts and how ordinary people made sense of the world around them.  Drawing on the methods of literary criticism, cultural studies, and anthropology, this field of history reads the past as a text, reminding us that the intricacy and complexity we associate with great works of art are also the province of everyday life.