By the 1980s, social history had transformed the discipline. It brought ordinary people into view, counted them, mapped their movements, traced their economic circumstances. But some historians began asking a question that numbers couldn't answer: what did it all mean to the people who lived it?

The new cultural history emerged as both continuation and critique. Its practitioners didn't reject social history's democratizing impulse—they wanted to understand historical actors on their own terms. But they argued that material conditions alone couldn't explain how people understood their world, made sense of their experiences, or constructed the categories that organized their lives.

This shift drew on unfamiliar intellectual resources: anthropology's thick description, literary theory's attention to language, philosophy's questions about meaning. The result was a fundamental reorientation in how historians approached their evidence—and fierce debates about whether the discipline had lost its footing.

Lynn Hunt's 1989 edited volume The New Cultural History served as the movement's programmatic statement. Hunt argued that social historians had treated culture as a reflection of deeper social realities—beliefs, values, and practices explained by class position, economic interest, or social structure. The new cultural history inverted this relationship.

Culture wasn't merely reflective; it was constitutive. The categories through which people understood their world—gender, nation, class itself—weren't natural facts waiting to be discovered. They were culturally constructed, historically contingent, and actively shaped by the practices through which people made meaning.

This meant changing what counted as explanation. Social historians asked why people acted as they did, seeking causes in material conditions. Cultural historians asked how people understood their actions, seeking the webs of meaning that made certain choices thinkable while rendering others invisible.

The implications were unsettling. If class identity was constructed through language and practice rather than determined by economic position, then the causal arrows social historians had relied upon pointed in multiple directions—or perhaps nowhere stable at all.

Takeaway

Asking how people made meaning differs fundamentally from asking why they acted. The first question reveals the categories that made certain actions possible; the second assumes those categories were already given.

The new cultural historians borrowed Clifford Geertz's method of 'thick description'—treating cultural practices as texts that could be read for their underlying logic. A public execution wasn't just an event to be counted; it was a theatrical performance encoding assumptions about sovereignty, justice, and the relationship between ruler and ruled.

Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre exemplified this approach. Darnton took an episode that seemed merely bizarre—eighteenth-century printing apprentices slaughtering cats—and read it as a symbolic ritual expressing tensions about labor, sexuality, and bourgeois respectability that the workers couldn't articulate directly.

The method demanded interpretive virtuosity. Historians had to reconstruct the symbolic vocabularies available to historical actors, understand what associations a ritual or representation would have evoked, and explain why certain forms rather than others served to express particular meanings.

Critics worried this approach made historical interpretation unfalsifiable. How could one adjudicate between competing readings? What counted as evidence that a particular symbolic interpretation was wrong? The new cultural history's interpretive richness sometimes seemed purchased at the cost of methodological rigor.

Takeaway

Treating practices as texts reveals hidden logics—but the interpreter must demonstrate why their reading is more plausible than alternatives, not merely more interesting.

By the late 1990s, critiques accumulated. The new cultural history, some charged, had floated free of material constraints. It treated meaning-making as if it occurred in a realm untouched by economic hardship, physical violence, or institutional power. The body disappeared into discourse; suffering became representation.

Feminist historians were among the first to push back. Gender might be culturally constructed, but the material consequences of that construction—unequal wages, domestic violence, restricted mobility—couldn't be dissolved through interpretation. The challenge was maintaining attention to meaning while reconnecting it to material conditions.

What emerged wasn't a return to old social history but attempts at synthesis. Historians began asking how cultural categories enabled or constrained material possibilities—how constructions of race shaped access to resources, how symbolic practices reinforced or undermined economic hierarchies, how meaning and materiality co-constituted each other.

This 'material turn' didn't resolve the tensions between cultural and social approaches. But it acknowledged what pure culturalism had obscured: meaning-making happens within material circumstances that are not themselves merely meaningful. People construct their worlds, but not under conditions of their own choosing.

Takeaway

Cultural construction doesn't occur in a vacuum. The most sophisticated approaches ask how meaning-making and material conditions shape each other without reducing either to the other.

The new cultural history's legacy is ambivalent. It permanently expanded what historians could study and how they could study it. Rituals, representations, and everyday practices became legitimate objects of serious analysis rather than mere illustrations of deeper social forces.

But the movement's strongest claims—that meaning was prior to materiality, that language constructed rather than reflected reality—proved difficult to sustain. The most lasting work emerged from historians who refused to choose sides, asking instead how the cultural and material intertwined.

What remains is a heightened sensitivity to how historical actors understood their worlds—and a productive tension between competing historiographical commitments that continues to generate new questions.