Contemporary Western Cultural History Research

The New Cultural History (NCH), which first appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, is the mainstream of current Western historiography. With the so-called "cultural turn" or "linguistic turn" in the Western human and social sciences, and against the limitations of social history or social-scientific history, a turn also occurred in the discipline of history. That is the rise of NCH. The NCH is a reaction against the old "new history", and a progress as well. In comparing with its predecessor, the NCH has two basic characteristics. Firstly, it concerns with the cultural elements and cultural aspects in the past, that is, it turned the subjects and fields of history from the political, military, economic, and social to the cultural. Secondly, it launches a cultural approach in history research. The NCH turned to the neighbor disciplines, like anthropology, linguistics, literary theories, and cultural studies, and explored the cultural meanings in the analysis of discourses, symbols, and rituals.The NCH unified the old terms like social cultural history, historical anthropology, and anthropological history. From the inside of history discipline, the NCH is an international collective movement. Its source was in France, and it flourished across the Western world, from Europe to America. Now its influence can be witnessed in all of world, even in China. Some researches with the NCH approaches also emerged in Chinese history studies. In the mainstream, the NCH or social-cultural history took the place of economic-social history or social scientific history. Almost in all the history sub-disciplines, political history, economic history, and history of science, there are more concerns on culture than ever before. The practitioners in those areas also tend to call themselves certain cultural historians. Cultural interpretation, micro analysis, codes, symbols and rituals, processeses of diffusion and reception, representations and practices, daily lives and ordinary people, more narrative and popular, all of these are the features and concerns of NCH. With these, the NCH overturned the simple determinism of the social and the economic, and removed the cultural from the superstructures to the base. The NCH also broke the narrow preconception of the classical cultural history, which only focused on the culture of elites and intellectuals, and restored the cultures and lives of common people in the past. From the outside, the rise of NCH was a part of the cultural turn orthe linguistic turn. It could also be covered in the category of the broad cultural studies. Actually, it is a kind of cultural study within the historical time scope, and is a particular history research with the views and approaches of cultural studies. On the other aspect, the NCH referred itself to other disciplines from outside, and featured in its interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives. It borrowed the concepts of culture, vision of investigation and way of interpretation from anthropology, got the tools of analysis from literary theories, linguistics and semiotics, and learned the attitudes of criticism from the postmodernism, like structuralism and post-structuralism.This thesis has two parts. Part one is a general analysis on the theories and methodologies of the NCH from different aspects. Part two focuses on five leading new cultural historians, Peter Burke, Lynn Hunt, Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Damton, and Roger Chartier. Through their comments on NCH and their magnum opuses in this field, this part demonstrates the features of NCH in detail.