The Cultural Turn in U. S. History

Past, Present, and Future

James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, Michael O'Malley, James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, Michael O'Malley

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780226115078, 9780226115061
• eBook ISBN: 9780226924823
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

A definitive account of one of the most dominant trends in recent historical writing, The Cultural Turn in U.S. History takes stock of the field at the same time as it showcases exemplars of its practice.

 

The first of this volume's three distinct sections offers a comprehensive genealogy of American cultural history, tracing its multifaceted origins, defining debates, and intersections with adjacent fields. The second section comprises previously unpublished essays by a distinguished roster of contributors who illuminate the discipline's rich potential by plumbing topics that range from nineteenth-century anxieties about greenback dollars to confidence games in 1920s Harlem, from Shirley Temple's career to the story of a Chicano community in San Diego that created a public park under a local freeway. Featuring an equally wide ranging selection of pieces that meditate on the future of the field, the final section explores such subjects as the different strains of cultural history, its relationships with arenas from mass entertainment to public policy, and the ways it has been shaped by catastrophe. Taken together, these essays represent a watershed moment in the life of a discipline, harnessing its vitality to offer a glimpse of the shape it will take in years to come.  

PART I

Introduction

ONE

Twelve Propositions for a History of U.S. Cultural History

JAMES W. COOK AND LAWRENCE B. GLICKMAN

This volume was born of our belief that the time is ripe for a broad assessment of U.S. cultural history. Since the mid-1970s, at least, cultural historians working on a wide range of topics have stretched, deepened, and dramatically transformed our sense of the nation’s past. And if one includes the important body of historical scholarship produced under the banner of American studies, the U.S. field would feature a lineage that actually precedes the “new cultural history” by more than three or four decades. Yet these same signs of innovation, breadth, and longevity have often pushed against neat and easy categorization. With a few notable exceptions, U.S. cultural historians have tended to prioritize new research over methodological reflection, leaving the important work of field assessment to their Europeanist colleagues (who in turn have often defined their own trajectories as “cultural history” writ large).¹

By calling for a dedicated history of the U.S. field, we do not mean to suggest that it can be easily disentangled from parallel projects in other national contexts (a comparative question to which we return later). Nor has the U.S. field lacked tough and useful debates about its own working methods. Yet these more explicit conversations about historiography have tended to cluster around particular topics—from consumerism, popular culture, and the concept of cultural hegemony to working-class life, moral problems, and the cultures of the cold war—rather than the larger enterprise of cultural history itself.² Even today, as some commentators have begun to speculate on a methodological future “beyond the cultural turn,” we still lack a clear sense of what, exactly, the U.S. field was for much of the past century.³

In this introductory chapter, we look backward and forward, and also meditate on the current state of U.S. cultural history. In looking backward, we attempt to sort through the multiple strands of questioning that first coalesced into a recognizable disciplinary project, now often described as the “cultural turn.” This story is one that currently exists only in bits and pieces, and is largely unknown even by many of the field’s practitioners. We begin with the conviction that any speculations on the future need to be grounded in a much longer, broader, and more comparative view of the field’s complex development.

At the same time, we want to look forward by tracing some of the field’s current and future contours. Now that cultural history has come to occupy a central disciplinary position, how should we think about its once controversial efforts to make language, identity, perception, and meaning-making primary objects of historical analysis? Are these efforts best understood as the momentary correctives of older blind spots? Or have they fostered more lasting and productive projects?

As an object of analysis, U.S. cultural history presents a number of built-in challenges. One is the field’s remarkable diversity, a pattern well illustrated by the roster of contributors to this volume. Some of us began our careers in social, intellectual, labor, gender, and African American history and only slowly gravitated toward cultural history as a self-description. Others of us went to graduate school specifically to train in American studies or U.S. cultural history and have spent much of our careers working within well-established national networks. Much the same can be said about our current institutional locations. Some of us were hired in American studies programs and now teach (at least part of the time) in history departments, whereas others have spent much of their history careers pushing toward more interdisciplinary modes of teaching, research, and writing. Over half of us currently hold joint appointments.

These complex conjunctures point to one of the field’s defining features. Although we see ourselves as engaged in common analytical problems and source types, none of us would insist upon a fixed or finished method for “doing” cultural history. Nor would we insist on any one definition of “culture,” a notoriously slippery concept whose multiple meanings have long thwarted strict categorical precision.⁴ Of course, this very flexibility runs the risk of producing a kind of Rashomon effect, with each cultural historian telling a different story about the field’s origins and foundational practices. We begin, then, with twelve propositions for assembling a more coherent history of U.S. cultural history. We offer these propositions not as a comprehensive chronicle—something that would require much more than a single introductory essay—but as multiple angles of approach on a large and shifting target.

Proposition One: The new cultural history was, in fact, a relatively late development

This initial proposition will no doubt strike some readers as counterintuitive. After all, the phrase “new cultural history” did not achieve common currency until at least the late 1980s.⁵ And since that time, most leading commentators, especially on the European side, have described it as a specific response to major intellectual shock waves from the previous decade. Some have pointed to the growing disenchantment with quantitative analysis that led many “new social historians” to push for alternative ways of accessing the subjective experiences and perceptions of nonelites. Others have emphasized the budding historical interest in symbolic systems and rituals of meaning-making, projects commonly associated with the anthropological writings of Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, and above all, Clifford Geertz. Still others have highlighted Michel Foucault’s efforts to explicate the microworkings of power through shifting patterns of discourse.⁶

We too see these developments as crucial and in this chapter attempt to trace some of their distinctive American resonances. But first we want to challenge the more basic notion of the “new cultural history” as a methodological starting point. On the European side, such a periodization would elide dozens of pioneering efforts by French Annalistes such as Lucien Febvre, British neo-Marxists such as Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, and American Europeanists such as Natalie Davis, Carl Schorske, and Robert Darnton. On the U.S. side, by contrast, it would neglect a vast body of postwar scholarship (largely but not exclusively within American studies) that sought to historicize dominant patterns of language, imagery, and collective perception three or four decades before the arrival of Geertz and Foucault.⁷

The problems of periodization become more pronounced when we examine some of the very first investments in culture.⁸ Often forgotten now is the fact that something called cultural history was periodically prominent in the U.S. field before World War II, practiced by some of the country’s most important historians. As Harry Elmer Barnes noted in 1922, summing up the goals of the “New American history,” our nation’s past “can by no means be restricted to a record of political and military development. The most notable American achievements have been nonpolitical in character.” In particular, Barnes singled out “psychological and cultural elements” as the key alternatives to political and military history.⁹

These early developments were shaped by a number of broader innovations in the social sciences. Among the most crucial was the pioneering anthropological work of Franz Boas from the late 1910s through the 1930s. “After Boas,” explained the eminent sociologist Robert Lynd, culture came to be understood not so much as a racialized set of evolutionary traits but as “the ways that people inhabiting a common geographic area … do things … the ways they think and feel about things.”¹⁰ It was also during this period that some of the best-known literary and humanistic definitions from the nineteenth century began to give way. Matthew Arnold’s rarified notion of culture as “the best which has been thought and said,” for example, was now increasingly supplanted by the longstanding German emphasis on “the totality of ideas in a society, popular as well as scholarly—in other words, low as well as high culture.”¹¹

In the U.S. field, the major historiographical innovator during the 1930s was Caroline Ware, who launched a series of new research projects on previously “neglected” topics such as documentary photography, folklore, and popular music. To promote her “bottom-up” vision of U.S. history, Ware organized dozens of panels at the American Historical Association meeting in 1939. And in 1940 she edited a major AHA-sponsored volume based on those sessions, The Cultural Approach to History.¹² This volume received widespread critical attention from many leading scholars, including Melville J. Herskovits, Charles Beard, and Crane Brinton.¹³ One contemporary reviewer, using language that many of us assume only arose in the late 1960s, noted that “many of the writers” begin from the proposition that “history should concern itself with the inarticulate masses, their lives, languages, loves, etc.”¹⁴ Whereas previous historians had focused primarily on society’s “intellectual and political leaders,” the goal now was to understand “processes of change” that affected “the multitude.”¹⁵

For Ware, in particular, these goals were part of an explicitly “integral” approach to the study of history, as well as a more socially conscious orientation in an age of “mass unemployment” and “the degradation of totalitarian war.” “The historian of today,” she concluded, “no longer secure within the framework of nineteenth-century Western European assumptions, needs new intellectual tools with which to view his society.”¹⁶

Looking back on these efforts four decades later, one contributor to Ware’s volume, the eminent business historian Thomas Cochran, wondered why such a promising body of research had not become “synonymous with history” (which is what Cochran and many of his colleagues had hoped and predicted during early 1940s).¹⁷ The prominent anthropologist Ruth Benedict shared Cochran’s view, writing to Ware in April 1941: “I have been reading ‘The Cultural Approach to History’ and I am delighted with your introduction…. I believe it will stimulate much valuable historical work; perhaps, even, in ten years, it will be possible to get out a really definitive collection of historical studies of the kind you call for.”¹⁸

From our own vantage point, it is easier to see that Ware’s innovative projects of the late 1930s were alternatively ignored, recast, or unselfconsciously absorbed by the dominant groups of political, intellectual, and social historians that soon followed, a pattern that led many self-described culturalists of the 1970s and 1980s to assume they were entering into wholly uncharted territory.¹⁹ As Donald Kelley observed in a 1996 review essay, the “most recent phase of cultural history has not paid much attention to its antecedents.”²⁰

As a first step, then, it seems important to recast the “new cultural history” of the late 1980s in more precise terms: not as a wholly distinctive historiographical phenomenon, or as the field itself, but as one major development within a much longer twentieth-century trajectory.

Proposition Two: The broad historical interest in culture that first took root during the 1930s did not simply disappear in the years following World War II

Once again, our genealogical instincts may seem to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. Previous discussions of Ware’s career, for example, have generally characterized her postwar influence as less significant, not least because Ware herself pursued a series of very different professional projects, including government service, consumer activism, and teaching social work classes at Howard University.²¹ Likewise, most general surveys have described the postwar years as dominated by the “presidential synthesis” and “consensus history”—two projects that seem to have little in common with the bottom-up perspectives, popular sources, and pluralistic models running through Ware’s 1940 volume.

To some extent, these characterizations are accurate. Few today would argue that something called U.S. cultural history constituted a dominant, or even particularly coherent, field during the late 1940s and 1950s. Fewer still would insist on tracing direct lines of influence between Ware’s cultural approach and the more pervasive cultural turn that began to take shape three or four decades later. One could argue, in fact, that it was directly in opposition to the presidential synthesis and consensus historiography—with their conventional emphases on elite white men, high-level diplomacy, electoral politics, and ideological continuity—that many of the subsequent innovators in U.S. cultural history positioned themselves.²²

Still, this familiar trajectory can be qualified and sharpened in a number of ways. One has to do with consensus history itself. As Robert Berkhofer first noted, it was precisely by applying prewar social science’s more expansive concept of culture to American politics that so-called consensus scholars such as Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, and David Potter sought to explain the relative absence of socioeconomic conflict in U.S. history.²³ The specific models varied from author to author and text to text. In the American Political Tradition (1948), for example, Hofstadter referred to “common climates of opinion” and “bounded horizons” of political debate, whereas Potter’s Peoples of Plenty (1954) emphasized the “traits,” “values,” and “behavioral patterns” central to the formation of “national character.”²⁴ For our purposes, however, the most ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I : Introduction
• Part II: Practicing Cultural History
• Part III: Agendas for Cultural History
• Part IV: Epilogue
• Notes
• Notes on Contributors
• Index