16

Cultural History and Media Studies

Richard K. Popp

Media studies' interdisciplinary nature has meant that it has borrowed liberally from fields across academia, pocketing a useful theory here or a helpful methodology there. In this way, the field can be seen as almost a direct outgrowth of the “genre mixing” (Geertz, 1983, p. 19) that reshaped academic study in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Variously called the “cultural turn,” the “linguistic turn,” and the “interpretive turn,” this development placed the humanities in the role of lender and the social sciences in that of borrower, reversing the trade flow of concepts that had characterized social research in the mid-twentieth century. “The instruments of reasoning are changing,” anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in 1983, “and society is less and less represented as an elaborate machine or a quasi-organism and more as a serious game, a sidewalk drama, or a behavioral text” (p. 23). In media scholarship, these currents made themselves most apparent in the growing profile of researchers working within the frameworks of cultural studies, critical theory, political economy, and qualitative sociology between the 1970s and 1990s. In this regard, James Carey's 1975 call for a “cultural approach to communication” and Todd Gitlin's 1978 reimagining of the field as helmed by C. Wright Mills instead of Paul Lazarsfeld can be read as prophetic of changes just over the horizon, as media studies shifted its footing from a field dominated by questions of behavior to one largely concerned with questions of culture (Carey, 1992; Gitlin, 1978).

Similar changes were afoot in academic history too, as the study of cultural institutions gained wider acceptance and more traditional areas of inquiry – politics, diplomacy, business, labor, technology, African American history, and women's history – came to look more like culture. The “new cultural history,” as it was eventually dubbed, represented a shift in both orientation and method (Hunt, 1989). Whether one was studying Hollywood studios or plantation slavery, the innovative thing to do was to treat that subject matter as culture in need of interpretation (Darnton, 1980; Hunt, 1989). Thus the new cultural history assigned itself many of the same interpretive challenges as media studies, only directed at the past.

This essay draws on historiographic debates within the US academy in the fields of history, American studies, and historical sociology, tracking the cultural turn and the subsequent twists it has taken over the past four decades. Historiography deals with how historical research is conceptualized, planned out, and executed. It provides a kind of scaffolding that helps to organize the aims of a researcher, the theoretical perspectives she or he will bring to bear on a topic, the scope and scale of their study, and the way their work will engage with ongoing debates. Historiography, then, is what makes it possible to take an enormous area, such as the history of television, and narrow it down to a researchable topic, such as the gender norms of television viewing in 1950s suburbia or the work culture of African American screenwriters in 1970s Los Angeles. Ironically, this process has the effect of both narrowing and expanding the scope of study. Our two examples no longer aspire to tell us the story of television in its entirety, but they do tell us part of that story in great detail. And just as importantly, they open outward to write new chapters in the histories of gender, race, domestic life, suburbia, urban life, creative work, and other areas. Different historiographies generate different questions; they point to different archives; and they provide different frameworks for sorting out and presenting one's findings. As we will see, they also provide different ways to think about culture.

Understanding meaning making and its capacities to shape society is difficult enough in the present. Yet interpretation poses particularly thorny questions in historiography because researchers are interested in describing social worlds and patterns of thought that have dissipated into the past (Douglas, 2008). Historians have written extensively about the challenges involved in recovering the complexities of culture. Media studies scholars stand to benefit from eavesdropping on these conversations. Doing so can help us clarify our conceptions of culture and in the process hone our interpretive methodologies. Moreover, these debates offer cues and insights into how theories of culture can be translated into historical projects that help us better understand the many ways in which media have fit into social experience.

This chapter is structured to take the reader, in roughly chronological fashion, through the primary ways that culture has been defined and treated as an area of historical inquiry since the start of the cultural turn. The debates it explores occurred largely, although not entirely, among scholars based in the United States, though in many cases their areas of study were international and much of the theory they enlisted was European in origin. Sections examine symbolic anthropology, critical cultural theory, cultural studies, discourse and identity, and recent calls for a more avowedly sociocultural history that focuses on the interplay of semiotic systems and large-scale social structures. The essay closes by exploring three historiographic frameworks that lend themselves well to a cultural materialist approach – the culture industry revisited, the history of the senses, and the history of the book. Throughout the essay, I highlight studies that exemplify how different conceptions of culture have been put into action. The examples chosen are studies that have been influential in their fields and explore some facet of media culture.

Turn 1: Symbolic Anthropology and Folklore Studies

To understand how historians have dealt with interpretation, it is helpful to understand how questions of semiotics, hegemony, discourse, identity, and cultural practice became central concerns in the first place. In one way or another, the study of culture – in the anthropological “whole way of life” sense – attracted attention for much of the twentieth century. In the 1930s scholars began to look at popular texts as legitimate sources that might offer a window into everyday life; in the postwar years, the “myth and symbol” school of American studies produced sophisticated works on the place of iconography in historical change; meanwhile, a branch of the Annales School in France turned their attention to mentalités, or patterns of thought; and at roughly the same time, British investigations into ordinary life and working-class expression began to coalesce into the new field of cultural studies (Cook & Glickman, 2008).

Notwithstanding these important predecessors, it was the impasse felt by historians in the 1970s as they struggled to overcome the limitations posed by the tools of contemporary historiography that sparked a turn toward cultural theory and in retrospect signaled the beginning of a coherent subfield. At the time, the motor of innovation in historical methodology was the “new social history” and involved appropriating the tools of quantitative social science. The aim was to translate administrative records and other quantifiable documents, such as census reports and tax records, into large pools of data that shed light on populations who otherwise left little mark on the historical record. In time, these studies could be combined into sweeping insights into the workings of broad-scale social transformation. Yet even the new social history's wider lens on the past seemed to obscure as much as it revealed. As William Sewell (2005, p. 40), then a young social historian, recalled of the time:

For Sewell and a handful of others, anthropology, which at the time was still oriented toward mapping the logics of non-Western cultures, looked as though it might offer the same possibilities for peoples of the past.

Clifford Geertz's work in symbolic anthropology had a profound influence on this development. His 1973 essay collection, The Interpretation of Cultures, attracted droves of admirers and, just as crucially, Geertz worked closely with a number of young historians, including Sewell and Robert Darnton, at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Research. Historians were attracted to Geertz for the same reasons that communication scholars like Carey were: his essays provided a means of thinking about culture as not just an aspect of social life, but as the interpretive capacities that made human experience and social organization possible in the first place. “Undirected by culture patterns – organized systems of significant symbols,” Geertz (1973, p. 46) argued, “man's behavior would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless.” Culture, the “accumulated totality” (p. 46) of semiotic communication in a society, provided the lens through which the physical world was refracted as social reality. Thus acts of communication – utterances, stories, rituals, and so on – were strands within “webs of significance” (p. 5) that made raw experience readable. Recovering the insider's view, or the “subjective meaning of action” (Weber, 1968, p. 9) – which Geertz characterized as the capacity not only to distinguish the intentionality behind a wink from the involuntary spasm behind a twitch, but to tell a flirtatious wink from a mocking wink and a mocking wink from a parodied wink, and so on – was the task of cultural analysis; the analyst's method, “thick description,” was to dig through layer upon layer of context.

For historians, Geertz's theories meant that popular expression and public ritual could be read as a text with an internal cohesion that in turn revealed underlying patterns of thought (Walters, 1980). Historians did not rely on Geertz alone. Other anthropologists – Victor Turner, Keith Basso, and Mary Douglas – were also influential, offering ways to think about rites of passage, jokes, and boundaries (Darnton, 1986). Folklore studies showed itself useful too. Again, the task was to treat genres of popular representation as a larger sense-making system. Even the popular culture of modern societies, historian Lawrence Levine (1992) argued, could be analyzed as folklore. Movies, hit songs, novels, and other mass culture texts may not convey the same sense of folk authenticity as pre-industrial forms, he acknowledged, but they could nevertheless act as arenas “in which many essential things are realized: lessons are learned, values enunciated and repeated, modes of behavior scrutinized, social institutions and their effects explored, fantasies indulged” (Levine, 1992, p. 1392). In other words, popular texts could be treated as not only imperfect representations of reality, but also representations for reality – or symbolic resources audiences used to interpret social life.

Thus whether Geertz's name was invoked or not, his call for thick description, or the notion that the telling detail could be unpacked to reveal a whole universe of symbolic logic, was central to the interpretive turn in history. Indeed, some of the most influential early examples of the cultural turn revolved around singular incidents (Davis, 1983; Ginzburg, 1980). Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984) might be the purest example of Geertzian anthropology applied to historical inquiry. Having first made his name in intellectual history and the social history of the book trade in Enlightenment France, Darnton's exposure to anthropology turned him into an advocate of “history in the ethnographic grain” (1984, p. 3). Darnton framed his approach as a kind of democratized intellectual history, explaining:

But how does one enter into the minds of individuals who lived centuries ago and left little to no direct evidence of their thoughts in correspondence, diaries, and other traditional sources? The answer was to examine what they thought with: narratives, rituals, and symbols. All could be scrutinized for what they meant at the time through an ongoing process of deep contextualization, “passing from text to context and back again until [the historian] has cleared a way through a foreign mental world” (p. 6). In charting this landscape, Darnton saw great value in the unusual because it forced the historian to directly confront the utter “otherness” of the past. In a Geertzian sense, the initially inscrutable episode or detail “winked” at the historian. “When we cannot get a proverb, or a joke, or a ritual, or a poem,” Darnton explained, “we know we are on to something. By picking at the document where it is most opaque, we may be able to unravel an alien system of meaning” (p. 5).

Darnton's “wink” was a particularly grisly piece of working-class folklore from the print shops of eighteenth-century Paris – the story of a pair of apprentices who, seething with resentment toward a cruel master and mistress, pulled off an elaborate ruse to ceremoniously slay their cats. Layer by layer, Darnton unpacked the story, revealing the printing trade's deteriorating labor conditions and rough and tumble work culture, the wanton animal abuse that characterized merrymaking at the time, and the occult sexuality that swirled around the symbol of the cat in old regime France. Context in place, Darnton showed how the massacre and its ritual retelling was understood by its perpetrators as an act of defiance, allowing them to humiliate their employer, but in a manner that was enigmatic enough to get away with. Darnton's choice of a disturbing event was intentional. Although the book was an essay collection, it took its title from the chapter that was most likely to induce a feeling of “culture shock” (1984, p. 4). As Darnton saw it, the cringe readers felt forced them to acknowledge the distance between themselves and people of the past. Such an understanding of history brought the contingency of culture into sharp relief because it showed that everyday life has accommodated an astonishing array of mental landscapes.

The turn toward symbolic anthropology was not without its detractors. For the traditional minded and diehard social historians, the cultural turn represented something of a detour into triviality. But even sympathetic observers saw real shortcomings in the new ethnographic history. Some suggested that by turning everything into culture, scholars left themselves vulnerable to missing those moments when major shifts in cultural practice were themselves a driving engine of change (Biernacki, 1999). More often, though, symbolic anthropology was criticized as ill equipped for explaining structural social power (Nord, 1988). One problem with the Geertzian approach, critics held, was that it was overly synchronous, or focused on isolated moments. The simple mechanics of thick description, which involved freezing time in order to draw connections between various cultural elements – for instance, tomcats and apprenticeships – diverted attention from diachronic change, or change in time; thus the historian lost sight of large-scale shifts in social power that don't take place within the temporal framework of the moment, but in the much longer sweep of time as it unfolds across years, decades, or even centuries (Sewell, 2005).

Turn 2: The Culture Industry, Hegemony, and Cultural Studies

Historians most concerned with questions of power had other camps to raid. Specifically, they drew on Western Marxism and gravitated toward notions of ideology and hegemony. These ideas were in some cases more than a half-century old, but they nonetheless represented fresh thinking in the 1970s. Gramsci (1971), who penned his thoughts as a political prisoner in Fascist Italy, had been almost unknown in the English-speaking world before a few Marxist historians began to champion his writings in the 1960s (Eley, 2005). The Frankfurt School's critical sociology was better known to postwar social scientists, but much of the school's earlier work in cultural criticism, written between the 1920s and 1940s, had been little read. Around 1970, both sets of ideas began to reach larger audiences when English translations of key works appeared in wide release for the first time. In addition, a number of influential historical studies, such as Eugene Genovese's (1974) work on hegemony in US slavery, appeared at roughly the same time, demonstrating the remarkably original forms of analysis such frameworks could yield.

Again, historians were drawn toward critical theory for many of the same reasons that media scholars were. In Gramsci's case, hegemony provided a whole new set of questions to ask about the interplay of culture and power. “To resort to the concept of cultural hegemony,” Jackson Lears (1985, p. 572) observed, “is to take a banal question – ‘who has power’ – and deepen it at both ends.” Driving this expansion was a number of key observations about how power worked in relation to culture in modern democratic societies: that subordination is more often secured through legitimation and acquiescence than strong-arm tactics; that the social alliances, or “historical blocs,” that safeguard the status quo often cut across class lines; that the reproduction of common sense parameters of thought, or “spontaneous philosophies,” is also the reproduction of economic power; and that subordination is never inevitable, total, or complete, but rather an ongoing and unstable process. True to his Marxist background, Gramsci maintained that power was ultimately used to maintain the primacy of capitalism; but in an important departure from Marxist orthodoxy, he saw that power radiating from popular experience in ways that critical scholars had previously ignored.

Hegemony, then, offered historians a framework that both foregrounded issues of social inequality and granted formidable clout to the symbolic. In this regard, it was sometimes promoted as a corrective to Geertzian methods. As Lears (1985, p. 573) explained: “People indeed create their own symbolic universes . . . But a given symbolic universe, if it becomes hegemonic, can serve the interest of some groups better than others.” Broadly put, a hegemonic approach was less concerned with recreating the inherent logic that governed bygone patterns of thought than in locating the areas of cultural life that at once accommodated desires for moments of autonomy and pleasure and reaffirmed structures of social inequality. Such an endeavor meant looking for the “cut-off,” as E. P. Thompson (1977) put it, or the point at which symbolic acts of dissent ultimately fizzled out. “The villager is wise within his own village,” Thompson (1977, p. 265) explained, “but accepts the inevitable organization of the outer world in the terms of the ruler's hegemony: he bitterly resents the exactions of the landowner and the moneylender but continues to believe in a just king or righteous Tsar.” That “cut-off” might take the shape of a charismatic ideology or it could be located within key cultural institutions – the church, schools, media, the marketplace, or other sites. In any case, the researcher's field of vision was refocused from culture in general to the engine rooms of ideology.

The Frankfurt School's critical framework lent itself well to this approach because it offered a means of understanding culture as both a situated mode of sense making and as the product of an industrialized news, entertainment, and marketing apparatus. According to this perspective, there were real implications to the fact that mass media texts were the end products of bureaucratic, systematized, and formulaic production processes. For Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), the great significance was that, as a form, mass culture ultimately expressed and executed the will to control that infused all forms of modern social organization. “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves . . .,” they wryly observed. “But freedom to choose an ideology – since ideology always reflects economic coercion – everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same” (pp. 166–167). Most insidious, from their perspective, was the tendency of mass culture to fetishize everyday forms of domination. “Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment” (p. 138). Such broadsides on mass entertainment later earned them the scorn of a generation of scholars more sympathetic to popular tastes. Yet those who looked beyond the Frankfurt School's narrow prescriptions of taste saw undeniable value in its central assertion that, as Lears (1992, p. 1420) put it, there were “interconnections between the apparently dissimilar realms of mass entertainment and instrumental rationality.”

In the hands of historians, critical theory proved a useful tool because it allowed them to place newfound importance on popular culture by treating it as a complex, multisited industry that emerged in conjunction with industrial modernity. Thus a scholar like John Kasson (1978) could describe the amusement parks of Coney Island as “laboratories of the new mass culture” (p. 8). The great appeal of the parks, Kasson argued, derived from their proprietors' skills at “sustaining the illusion of anarchic freedom and heedless release beneath the underlying reality of control” (p. 82). No matter how terrifying the “Loop the Loop” may have felt at full hilt, thrill seekers could rest assured that modern engineering kept it all very safe. Taking a similar approach, Jackson Lears (1994) could frame the rise of Madison Avenue as less the triumph of materialism than the height of managerialism. “Consumer culture there was . . .,” Lears acknowledged, “but it was less a riot of hedonism than a new way of ordering the existing balance of tensions between control and release” (pp. 10–11). Even scholars working in a less overtly theoretical vein, such as business historian Roland Marchand (1998), unmistakably framed media as a site of ideological production. Thus, for Marchand early public relations could be described as big business's carefully engineered response to popular unease about the scale and “soullessness” of corporate commerce.

What these works shared was a baseline recognition that mass culture is the product of complex bureaucratic processes and social relationships that intersect with the larger workings of consumer capitalism. Similarly, they recognized the asymmetrical nature of modern media culture. It made a difference, as Lears (1992, pp. 1422–1423) argued, “that some groups or classes had the capital to mass produce and mass market cultural forms, while other groups had to make the best of what they bought.” Moreover, by sticking close to concepts – rationalization, standardization, control, and commodification – rather than lapsing into a conspiratorial mindset, they were able to make compelling connections between culture and consciousness.

Scholars working in British cultural studies drank from the same theoretical waters and were concerned with many of the same issues. In their hands, however, these ideas oftentimes looked quite different. The “culture” in cultural studies has had a shape-shifting quality and its various iterations have had a tremendous impact on both media scholars and cultural historians. In cultural studies' formational years, culture referenced two specific intellectual projects. The first – tackled in the early work of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E. P. Thompson – was to pry the culture concept away from the guardians of Culture with a capital C by showing that ordinary forms of expression and ways of being – even in industrialized society – were just as worthy of the name. In short, the aim was to upend cultural hierarchy by replacing notions of culture as “the best and the brightest that has been thought” with an anthropological conception of culture as a “whole way of life” (Hall, 1980).

The second project built on the first, but shifted focus toward reconciling this new definition of culture with materialist conceptions of socioeconomic power. Marxist thought had long operated according to a base–superstructure model, placing only things economic on the left side of the hyphen and piling up everything else to the right of it. This meant that whatever economic base prevailed during a particular phase of history was thought to determine the cultural possibilities that could take shape. Williams and Thompson challenged this assumption early on by demonstrating that new economic orders were created within and through culture, not outside of it (Hall, 1980). As Thompson (1963, p. 9) famously put it: “The working class did not arise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.” Instead of a preordained demographic category, then, class was reconceived of as a process that was always carried out through cultural practices that, in time, congealed into institutionalized forms of social inequality. Williams put it differently, but also stressed the embedded nature of class. Using a chemical metaphor, Williams (1961) likened the culture of a given place and time, or “structure of feeling” (p. 64), to a “solution” (p. 63) that seamlessly incorporated all of the various elements of life – economic, social, cultural – into a complex whole that intuitively made sense from within. “The art is there, as an activity, with the production, the trading, the politics the raising of families” (p. 61).

Yet despite its strides toward debunking the simple base–superstructure model, this new understanding of culture remained unsatisfactory for materialists (Thompson and Williams included) who still felt that matters economic weighed disproportionately on lived experience. Most problematic was that these new definitions had difficulty accounting for the inertia of class dynamics, or their remarkable powers to reproduce themselves. Much of the field's intellectual energy from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s was devoted to working through this problem. For Williams (1977), the solution lay in a cultural materialist understanding of history. From this vantage point, culture was “constitutive and constituting” (p. 100) in that it was baked into the material processes by which society made and remade itself. As Williams (1980) saw it, this was a dynamic process, but it was by no means a democratic one because entrenched interests generally – but importantly, not always – held sway over “our assignments of energy; our ordinary understanding of the nature of man and his world” (p. 38). Stuart Hall built on this cultural materialist approach by infusing it with notions of ideology and interpellation drawn from French structuralist thought. The result was a vision of culture as a broad plain of ideological struggle: a site where asymmetrical power was reproduced, contested, or sometimes simply overlooked as individuals actively made sense of social reality and their place within it (Hall, 1980).

With the exception of E. P. Thompson's work in labor history, cultural studies' impact on historians was more measured and slower to appear in American scholarship. As the historian Michael Denning (Cohen, 2007) recollected of his return to New York City in the early 1980s, after pursuing graduate work with Hall at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, “at that point, cultural studies was not visible in the US” (p. 7). Within a few years, Williams's and Hall's influence began to show. Perhaps the best early example was Roy Rosenzweig's Eight Hours for What We Will (1983) – a community study of class dynamics in Worcester, Massachusetts. Rosenzweig's study drew on an archive that would have been familiar to social historians: community newspapers, city directories, local histories, and reports issued by various labor boards, government bureaus, and social reform groups. What set Rosenzweig's study apart from other labor community studies was that it shifted the focus of analysis from the factory and union hall to the saloons and newly built playgrounds, amusement parks, and movie houses of the industrial city, showing how they served as sites of resistance and eventual capitulation to industrial capital. Rosenzweig was particularly influenced by Raymond Williams's model of dominant, residual, alternative, and oppositional cultures. According to Rosenzweig's analysis, the saloon and grog shop were alternative spaces, or sites that fostered a unique, working-class way of life, different in significant ways from bourgeois norms and values, but nevertheless coexistent with them. Worcester elites, on the other hand, mistook such places for opposition and thus sought to reform or eradicate them. Class, leisure, and the new mass culture remained a popular topic among historians and by the early 1990s Robin D. G. Kelley (1992) could point to more than a dozen recent works that employed a cultural studies-inspired framework of contested terrains.

Turn 3: Discourse and Identity

Kelley's research, which focused on African American working-class culture, can be seen as transitional. Before the early 1990s, cultural studies was used as a way to better understand class; afterward it was just as often used to understand race, gender, and sexuality. Kelley's (1994) analysis of Malcolm X's dalliance with zoot suit culture in the 1940s, for instance, moved effortlessly back and forth between issues of blackness, masculinity, heteronormativity, and working-class identity. The shift in historiography was tied to changes in cultural studies itself as the discipline expanded its scope around 1980 to more directly engage with feminist theory and issues of race and empire (Hall, 1980). The field's broadening of horizons in part reflected its commitment to political intervention. But just as important was the growing influence of poststructural theory. Whereas structuralism emphasized the deep structures – generally understood to be conceptual binaries – that governed the mechanics of meaning making, poststructuralists argued that those binaries were themselves linguistic constructions. So for instance, Stuart Hall's (1981) essay “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’” not only emphasized the contested nature of popular culture, but also sought to problematize the category “popular” by showing its constructed and political nature. Viewed this way, the “popular” wasn't a fixed quality inherent in certain texts, but a “structuring principle” that divided “what, at any time, counts as an elite cultural activity or form, and what does not” (p. 234). Taking the full measure of poststructuralism's influence is beyond the scope of this essay, but its biggest impact on cultural history was that it shifted scholars' attention toward classificatory schema that produced impressions of difference and the processes by which those schema's boundaries were policed. Kelley (1992, p. 1402) for instance drew heavily on Hall's “Notes” (1981) to argue that taken-for-granted cultural binaries, such as high/low or folk/mass, must always be seen as “socially constructed categories that have something to do with the reproduction of race, class, and gender hierarchies.”

Simultaneous and closely related to these developments in cultural studies was the growing influence of postmodern thought on a number of influential feminist historians. The signal event in this case was the publication of Joan Wallach Scott's (1986) “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” In this explosive, if modestly titled, essay Scott urged historians to understand gender as not only a socially constructed set of norms and product of patriarchy, but as a discourse, or system of thought, that enabled power to be exercised across the entirety of social experience. In developing this argument, Scott drew heavily on literary criticism and feminist film studies, both of which had been overhauled in recent years by the poststructural thought of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan.

Scott's argument was heavily influenced by Foucault's theories of discourse and power, and in this regard it marked a turning point in how historians appropriated the French philosopher's ideas. Though Foucault's sprawling intellectual histories of the mid- to late 1960s attracted admirers across the humanities, historians largely ignored this body of work. Rather, Foucault's initial wave of influence in history departments grew out of his mid-1970s work on prisons and sexuality, which in turn led to the rediscovery of his earlier work on hospitals and asylums (Megill, 1987). This Foucault fit well with the aims of social history because he offered new ways to approach the study of stigmatized populations – criminals, the mentally ill, sexual nonconformists, and others. Scott's essay, on the other hand, signaled a new engagement with Foucauldian thought as a theory of culture. Though professional historians did not always look kindly upon his unorthodox methods, Foucault (1971/2010) saw historical inquiry, or what he called “genealogical” (p. 232) study, as at the center of his scholarly enterprise. From the “genealogical” perspective, the history of culture was the history of discourse formation, which could be traced by following the “conditions of appearance, growth, and variation” (p. 234) by which systems of knowledge were endowed with “the power of affirmation” (p. 234), or the authority to speak truth. This Foucault allowed historians to think about the ways that power flowed through bodies of knowledge and everyday conversations to eventually harden into institutionalized forms of authority and internalized modes of subjectivity. Equipped with such a perspective, Scott (1991, p. 779) argued, historians could get at complex processes of identity formation “that, through discourse, position subjects and produce their experience.”

The shift toward questions of discourse and identity represented a kind of second phase of the cultural turn that Nan Enstad (2008, p. 321) has described as the shift from a “visionary cultural history of subalterns” to a “deconstructive cultural history of categories and hierarchies.” In the former, historians appropriated the tools of anthropologists and folklorists to recover the social experience of downtrodden and marginalized peoples. In the latter they turned to poststructuralism and literary deconstruction to denaturalize and thus foreground the contingent nature of categorical differences and the social inequalities they buttressed.

Gail Bederman's Manliness and Civilization (1995) provides an early, influential, and especially direct example of this new approach. The study explored changing conceptions of US masculinity and race at the turn of the twentieth century, but it did so by providing a genealogical account of the discourse of “civilization.” “The interesting thing about ‘civilization’ is not what was meant by the term,” Bederman explains, “but the multiple ways it was used to legitimize different sorts of claims to power” (p. 23). In particular, “civilization” provided a means to reconcile “manliness,” the male gender ideal of Anglo-American bourgeois culture, with “masculinity,” the hot-tempered ways of being male that elites associated with immigrants and African Americans. Out of this discursive tumult came the figure of the modern man, refined enough to lead “civilization's” charge, but yet “savage” enough, when need be, to defend it from barbarism. Thus the focus of Bederman's study was a constellation of ideas – civilization, savagery, manliness, masculinity, whiteness, and blackness – that in their dominant formation conferred enormous social power. Her method of tracing its “appearance, growth, and variation” (Foucault, 1971/2010, p. 234) was to re-examine an eclectic, but well-known, cast of figures: boxer Jack Johnson, muckraker Ida B. Wells, psychologist G. Stanley Hall, feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, President Theodore Roosevelt, and novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs. To do so, Bederman relied on a fairly conventional archive of the memoirs, published writings, and letters of her subjects, coupled with contemporary newspapers, magazines, and nonfiction works. Much was already known about the figures Bederman studied. What wasn't known was how their thoughts and actions converged in unexpected ways to produce a powerful form of white male subjectivity in twentieth-century America.

Grace Elizabeth Hale's Making Whiteness (1998) provides another illustrative example of scholarship shaped by the turn toward discourse and identity. Hale's study of segregationist culture explored the racist discourses and rituals that surrounded the production of whiteness as a mode of identity in the Jim Crow South. As Hale demonstrates in her analysis of phenomena ranging from children's literature to national advertising and public lynchings, Jim Crow was not a holdover from antebellum culture, but a distinctly modern and wide-ranging project to brutally maintain the racial boundaries that White southerners feared were disappearing in the wake of Reconstruction. In keeping with the sweeping nature of the study, Hale drew on an astounding mix of sources that ranged from children's books to the lynching case files of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The growing interest in discourse and identity formation, especially with regard to race, also motivated historians to look at empire in new ways. Although historians of Europe and the ancient world had long made imperial expansion a major object of study, practitioners of the new social and cultural history had largely overlooked these questions. By the early 1990s, the growing influence of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, coupled with the weight of globalization as both a lived phenomenon and a thriving area of research, spurred scholars to look again. When they did, empire began to turn up everywhere from Wild West shows to middle-class cupboards (Eley, 2005).

As was the case with gender, the conceptual breakthrough came from thinking about empire outside the bounds of its traditional usage and seeing it instead as a far-reaching discourse. “Not only about foreign diplomacy or international relations,” literary critic Amy Kaplan argued in 1993, “imperialism is also about consolidating domestic cultures and negotiating intranational relations” (p. 14). Framed as such, empire offered a means of thinking about interethnic and interracial contact as it played out in various ways across the social and imaginative landscapes. On the one hand, imperialism provided the homegrown bodies of knowledge and stocks of symbolism through which Westerners imagined the foreign (Said, 1979). But also, these “imaginative geographies” (p. 49) could be projected onto the home environment to mark qualities of difference, exoticness, and danger. Historian Melani McAlister's (2001) analysis of the Middle East in postwar American culture offers a good example of the new thinking about empire. Drawing almost entirely on popular sources, Epic Encounters shows how US cultural productions ranging from The Ten Commandments (1956) to the traveling Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition (1977–1979) provided ordinary Americans with frameworks with which to make sense of a faraway place that, thanks to the dynamics of oil markets and Cold War geopolitics, was becoming tightly entwined with their everyday existence. But at the same time, McAlister demonstrated, these texts provided a kind of semiotic pool out of which various groups in the United States – including evangelical Christians, Black nationalists, Jewish Americans, and others – fished interpretive frameworks for understanding themselves and US political culture. Thus “representations of the Middle East,” McAlister (2001, p. xiv) argued, “simultaneously figured the United States in relation to its ‘outside’ (in terms of international power relations) and in relation to its ‘inside’ (the diverse and hierarchical construction of identities within the national borders).”

Historians' engagement with empire in the 1990s and 2000s had even more farreaching effects in that new conceptual tools, such as borderlands, called geographically fixed notions of culture into question. Developed by cultural theorists interested in frontiers, or zones of intercultural contact, borderlands scholarship suggested that societies were rippled, rather than ringed, by sites of hybridity and heterogeneity (Kaplan, 1993). “Space is neither necessarily coherent nor always homogenous,” anthropologist Renato Rosaldo (1988, p. 87) explained. “Nor need it parce [sic] neatly into zones . . . It just could be, more often than we usually like to think, criss-crossed by border zones, pockets, and eruptions of all kinds.” If any given place was always as much host to pockets of the foreign as it was pockets of the familiar, culture was poorly understood in terms of territorial interiors and exteriors. Rather, culture was how cultures sharing the same space overlapped with one another in ways that simultaneously produced commonalities and differences. One such “contact-zone,” as Kristin Hoganson (2007, p. 8) has shown, was the White, middle-class home at the turn of the twentieth century. Hoganson's Consumers' Imperium explores the role of imports, such as foreign foods, armchair travel media, and exotic furnishings, in the making of US domestic culture, demonstrating how “consumption constituted a form of interaction with the wider world” (p. 11). As a study of femininity and domesticity in consumer culture, Hoganson's book mined a wide variety of popular texts aimed at women – including cookbooks, home decor guides, and women's magazines and newspaper pages – along with the records of a number of social clubs. This archive resembled earlier studies of gender and consumer culture. What set it apart, however, was that Hoganson's historiographic framework attuned her to the many ways that an unmistakable interest in the foreign became virtually indistinguishable from the domestic in homes that sat hundreds of miles from the closest border.

Turn 4: Society, Structure, and Practice

At the start of the twenty-first century, the cultural turn began to turn back upon itself as some its earliest advocates asked whether the field was nearing a point of diminishing returns. To be sure, these critics remained committed to making culture an object of historical inquiry. But still, they wondered whether semiotic and discursive conceptions of culture had developed into a new orthodoxy that threatened to cloud historical vision. This critique took a number of forms. Some critics were alarmed by what they saw as an extreme relativism introduced by postmodern thought, warning that deconstruction and discursive analysis threatened to “collapse” all sense of explanatory power in social research (Bonnell & Hunt, 1999, p. 10). Others suggested that words like “culture” and “discourse” had been stripped of their theoretical nuances and permitted to grow into totalizing concepts. According to this critique, historians had actually removed culture from the flow of historical time by suggesting that it was always already loaded into any given moment (Biernacki, 1999; Spiegel, 2005).

Others lamented a hollowed-out sense of purpose in academic history, looking back with some envy on the agendas of inclusion and democratization that had inspired much of the new social history (Eley, 2005; Enstad, 2008). As Geoffrey Eley (2005, p. 199) observed, cultural historians in pursuit of nuance had willfully distanced themselves from the “big structures, large processes, huge comparisons” (borrowing the term from sociologist Charles Tilly) of the new social history. But as Eley, himself an eager promoter of the cultural turn, remarked, “we may still want to talk about class, about capitalism, about the structural distribution of inequalities . . . Why should embracing the possibilities of microhistory require leaving macrohistory entirely behind?”

Historians of culture and society were by no means alone in their retreat from macro thinking. Daniel Rodgers (2011) has shown that late twentieth-century intellectual life in general was marked by a “fracture” of the social. In the process, strong notions of society characterized in terms of “wider and wider rings of relations, structures, contexts, and institutions” (p. 4) dominant as late as the 1970s gave way to market-inflected “visions of society as a spontaneous, naturally acting array of choices and affinities” (p. 264). William Sewell (2005) also suggested that in retrospect, it was possible, if not also disconcerting, to identify a common thread that wound its way through both the cultural turn and the rise of neoliberalism. For him, historians' declining interest in large-scale political economic transformations had, to great irony, played out against the backdrop of one of those very transformations – the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist world economy. What these revisionist critiques shared in common was a sense that the cultural turn's elision of the macro, structural, and material created a dangerous blind spot. The question, then, was how to preserve the conceptual strides achieved along the way – and indeed, continue to build on them by incorporating new strands of theory – but also restore the attention to structural power that had marked the new social history. The answer lay in finding new ways to connect the discursive with the material, essentially doubling back around to revisit and revise notions of cultural materialism.

Sewell (2005) has written more extensively about this topic than any other historian, and his work is worth examining in detail. To paint his argument in broad strokes: he sees structure and culture as mutually constitutive:

To arrive at this point, Sewell drew heavily on symbolic anthropology, but supplemented it with theories of structure and practice drawn from Marshall Sahlins, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu. He remained convinced, with Geertz, that culture could best be understood as the semiotic dimensions of life by which groups used sign systems to project coherence upon the world; it was critical to remember, however, that this was always a “thin coherence” (p. 166) because language, when put into practice, is imperfect, polysemic, and subject to change. To explain this plasticity, Sewell pointed to the tendency of the material world to, at times, act upon and transform cultural schema, despite those schemas' best efforts to call the world into order. “Cultural categories,” he writes (paraphrasing Sahlins), “are worldly facts. They burden the world with potentials for human use . . . And they are burdened by the things they mark, dragged into new constellations of meaning when the course of action doesn't go as expected” (p. 218). Sewell's work suggests that culture can be studied both synchronically to examine intricacies of meaning at a given point in time, and diachronically to trace how meaning is materially structured and restructured as a “built environment” over the course of time. Micro and macro, long term and short term, and culture and structure are thus instantiated together within a “constructed” environment of social relations shaped by the various ways that meaning making and materiality weigh upon one another.

Whereas Sewell's materialism points to the hard physicality of architecture and geography, Gabrielle Spiegel (2008, p. 411) has advocated a “neo-phenomenological approach” that points more to the fleshy physicality of the body. Like Sewell, she sees meaning as grounded in material practices and created in the flow of time. Her approach differs, though, in that she draws largely from reflexive sociology. At one level, the neophenomenological approach explores the interplay between embodied action and structured social experience, or what Bourdieu (1980/1990) called the “habitus” and Giddens (1984) has called “structuration.” In doing so, it seeks to highlight the inherently corporeal and situational nature of interpretation by which the world and one's place in it is made knowable at the level of individual consciousness in ways that are socially conditioned, but nevertheless diverse and unpredictable. “Historical investigation . . .,” she explains, “would take practices (not structure) as the starting point of social analysis, and practice itself assumes the form of a sociology of meaning” (p. 412).

Spiegel points to the work of sociologist Andreas Reckwitz as particularly helpful here. Social practice, as Reckwitz (2005, p. 252) defines it, is “a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood.” Irreducible to any one facet, the different elements of a given practice are mutually generative and hang together according to some internal logic. The businessman who breaks off his lunch order to brusquely answer his mobile phone is carrying out a practice. Such acts are social in that they involve intersubjective forms of knowledge and culturally recognizable ways of acting that, like the habitus, are transposable across situations and between actors occupying similar social worlds. “When we learn a practice,” Reckwitz explains, “we learn to be bodies in a certain way” (p. 253).

Media Culture and Materiality: Culture Industries, Senses, and Books

The reworked culture concepts discussed above lend themselves well to communication scholarship. They retain an anthropological conception of social experience as grasped and reproduced through sign systems – which we might call the fruits of the cultural turn. In addition, they remain astute to the various ways that social inequality can be discursively generated within sign systems – the fruits of the linguistic turn. Yet the new frameworks build on these insights by recognizing that material objects, practices, and institutions can exert an outsized influence on the semiotic reproduction of social life. The remainder of this essay will explore three particular frameworks for studying media history that complement the new cultural materialism – the history of culture industries, the history of the senses, and the history of the book.

We might call the first framework the culture industry reconsidered. As discussed above, the rediscovery of the Frankfurt School in the 1970s played an important role in sparking the cultural turn. Once the turn was well underway, though, notions of rationalization, control, and commodification largely fell out of intellectual fashion. And just as importantly, the Frankfurt School's eviscerations of mass culture made it anathema to a whole generation's worth of scholars whose projects aimed to reconstruct the contested nature of culture in a particular place and time. Yet, as James Cook (2008) has pointed out, the “culture industry,” when used as a means to understand the business of culture rather than to assess its worth, offers a powerful lens on the past. “By moving the term ‘culture’ from noun to adjective . . .,” he remarks, “we shift the conceptual emphasis from qualitative measure to mutable institution” (p. 297). Moreover, the culture industry concept is well suited to connecting specific texts to larger structures of power. “Industry,” Cook points out, “simultaneously signifies a microlevel site of production and a macrolevel system of circulation” (p. 297). Finally, the concept's focus on particular industry processes, including “standardization, distribution, marketing, and integration” (p. 297), provide the historian with specific, but by no means predictable, paths to follow. When carefully reconstructed, these processes open a window into bygone work cultures that in themselves are rich and complex microcosms of a particular time. Beyond that, these worlds can tell us much about what happens when the logics of business meet the logics of cultural expression.

David Suisman's Selling Sounds (2009) offers a good example of an updated culture industry approach. Suisman's book can be read as a history of many things – musical trends, recording and playback technologies, city life, copyright law, Jewish American culture, African American business culture, and various other topics. But in sum, these parts tell a bigger story about the commodification of American music in the early twentieth century. “Commodification is not . . .,” Suisman is careful to note, “an instantaneous occurrence, like the flash pasteurization of milk. It is a social and political process, populated by human actors, and one that includes various dimensions and phases” (p. 9). Thus he reconstructs the methods by which publishers applied the twin logics of industrial capitalism – mass production and mass marketing – to popular music in the United States. This involved regimented production processes in the songwriting factories of Tin Pan Alley, sophisticated forms of market research, national marketing networks, and concerted efforts to reshape the politico-legal framework that governed the musical marketplace.

The story Suisman tells is a top-down affair and he relies largely on a mix of primary sources most associated with business history – corporate archives, trade journals, company publications, and the personal papers, memoirs, and oral histories of industry players. These sources allow Suisman to provide a detailed account of the music industry's rise. At the same time, his sophisticated use of culture industry concepts allows him to also tell a story about the capacities of consumer capitalism to drive far-reaching changes in culture. As he points out, commercial music's remarkable popularity helped make it a seemingly natural accompaniment to everyday life.

In making this last point, Suisman identifies how the industry not only introduced a new musical culture, but in doing so overhauled the sensory environment of everyday life. “As a consequence,” he argues, “the soundscape itself became a field of marketing, the aural equivalent of billboards . . . but far more invasive” (p. 14). Vision and hearing, Suisman contends, create different corporeal relationships with the outside world. Eyes can be averted, ears cannot. “Through the eye, you see the world out there . . . through ear, you hear the world in your head; it enters inside you” (p. 14). Suisman's attention to these phenomena makes Selling Sounds a good example of the second framework: the history of the senses. This growing field seeks to historicize the senses in terms of practice, discourse, meaning, and experience. To take sight/vision/eye/seen (but one could easily substitute hearing/ear/heard, scent/nose/smelt, and so on) as an example, the history of the senses can generate a host of interrelated questions: How have people used sight differently in various eras? How have ideas about vision changed over time? How have images of the eye conveyed very different meanings at different times? How has the seen environment changed over time?

Raising such questions historicizes fundamental aspects of experience and culture that are often overlooked. In this regard, the senses provide a fresh lens to re-examine well-researched subjects. To take a hypothetical example, a history of censorship during World War I might look very different when approached as a history of visual practices. Such a history might focus on the training of censors and the everyday work of blotting out objectionable imagery. Moreover, by emphasizing the embodied and phenomenological nature of meaning making, these questions allow us to see how every act of perception collapses the boundary between micro and macro, “nature and culture,” and “other perennial oppositions,” as Martin Jay (2011, p. 309) has observed. An attention to the senses perhaps accounts for the enduring originality of Susan Douglas's Listening In (1999/2004) which made the aural dynamics of radio listening central to the history of broadcasting in the United States. More recently, Andrew Kahrl (2008, p. 1125) has shown how “whites' auditory reception” of African American leisure pursuits helped to shape the dynamics of crime and the segregation of public space in Progressive era cities. “Cloaked in race-neutral language and dedicated to improving the quality of city life,” Kahrl writes, “noise crimes served as a convenient device for racializing concepts of civility and disorder” (p. 1125). In this regard, the history of the senses can call attention to the materiality of cultural life, highlighting the extent to which the social world is constructed and reconstructed to affect the senses in particular ways. Pointing to the many ways that the world is reordered to cater to visual practices, W. J. T. Mitchell (2002, p. 92) has remarked that “it is not just that we see the way we do because we are social animals, but also that our social arrangements take the forms they do because we are seeing animals.”

The final approach – the history of the book – offers another means of bringing materiality to the forefront. Book history developed in the last quarter of the twentieth century as scholars, dismayed by the abstracted treatment of printing, literary works, and literacy in academic study, aimed to situate these phenomena in specific social, cultural, and economic environments. The discipline's misleadingly narrow name derives from its early association with the history of print technology and bookselling in early modern Europe, but it has since grown to encompass the broad study of print culture. During this expansion, much of the field's intellectual energy has been directed toward probing the endlessly diverse ways that audiences have read and used texts (Nord, 2008).

Like the history of the senses, book history offers a “point of view” (Hall, 1996, p. 30), in this case, focusing the historian's gaze on an interrelated set of activities – reading, writing, publishing, printing, distribution, retail, filing, storage, and almost anything else involved in the organized circulation and use of information. On close inspection, any one of these activities can assume unexpected shapes and lead in surprising directions: books are pirated; newspaper boys strike; magazines are cut up and turned into artwork; and gamblers pore over morning papers in search of yesterday's numbers. Similar to the benefits of the revised culture industry approach, the history of the book forces historians to think about the production and use of texts within vast circulatory networks, or what Robert Darnton (2007) has called a “communications circuit.” Recently, Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway (2009) have advocated a looser, yet still systemic, understanding of print culture. Their approach sees print as a meeting ground where a diverse cast of social actors “interested in the production, use, control, and limitation” (p. 19) of particular texts are mapped together in spontaneous but structurally conditioned networks. In either case, book history has the capacity to turn any one piece of print matter – to take a hypothetical example, a colorful trade card propped up on the counter of a store in 1880s New Orleans – into a portal on a whole social world, linking the various actors, institutions, and cultures through which it passed.

Sam Binkley's (2007) Getting Loose provides such an example, speaking to the many possibilities a book history approach can afford. Binkley's study recounts how countercultural tastes were transformed in the 1970s into a mainstream consumer ethos. He reconstructs this process through the fulcrum of the West Coast publishing scene, analyzing publications such as the Whole Earth Catalog and the bestselling Tassajara Bread Book “as narrative texts and also as material things whose unique formats and design features often tell stories as valuable as the written messages they convey” (p. 20). In terms of narrative, Binkley is able to situate the ideas and trends that animated these projects within a particular place and time – the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 1960 and 1970s. But also, he's able to follow the diffusion of these texts and discourses across national “social and economic networks” by studying the institutional linkages that formed between craft “hippie” presses, such as San Francisco's Bookpeople, and the mainstream publishing giants of New York City. And finally, Binkley's close attention to materiality – in particular, the unfinished aesthetic of the publications themselves – enables him to connect bodily practices, such as the tactile pleasures of handling rough paper stock, to an emerging popular ideology: getting in touch with one's natural self.

To close, history's engagement with the complexities of meaning in recent decades has yielded an array of useful frameworks for thinking about culture and society. Some have shown themselves well suited to recovering the “thick,” multidimensional meaning of a communicative act frozen in time; others have proven better suited to explaining issues of culture and power. Because they drive the questions historians ask about their subjects, these frameworks can have direct implications for what sources are drawn upon and how those sources are interrogated. Many book historians gravitate toward evidence that allows them to map the flow of material texts through social networks. Historians of the senses, on the other hand, place a premium on sources that document contemporary accounts of sensory experiences. It is important to note that no one historiographic approach should be seen as entirely adequate in itself. Though these frameworks have developed in the flow of time, they have not superseded each other. Indeed, recent developments tell us that the most vivid and panoramic views of the past might come from circling back around to retool old concepts and combine them with the new.

REFERENCES

Bederman, G. (1995). Manliness and civilization: A cultural history of gender and race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Biernacki, R. (1999). Method and metaphor after the new cultural history. In V. E. Bonnell & L. Hunt (Eds.), Beyond the cultural turn: New directions in the study of society and culture (pp. 62–92). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Binkley, S. (2007). Getting loose: Lifestyle consumption in the 1970s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bonnell, V. E., & Hunt, L. (1999). Introduction. In V. E. Bonnell & L. Hunt (Eds.), Beyond the cultural turn: New directions in the study of society and culture (pp. 1–32). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1980/1990). The logic of practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Carey, J. W. (1992). Communication as culture. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992.

Cohen, V. (2007). The labor of culture: An interview with Michael Denning. Minnesota Review, 70. Retrieved July 25, 2013, from http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns70/interview_denning.shtml

Cook, J. W. (2008). The return of the culture industry. In J. W. Cook, L. B. Glickman, & M. O'Malley (Eds.), The cultural turn in US history (pp. 291–317). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Cook, J. W., & Glickman, L. B. (2008). Twelve propositions for a history of US cultural history. In J. W. Cook, L. B. Glickman, & M. O'Malley (Eds.), The cultural turn in US history (pp. 3–57). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Darnton, R. (1980). Intellectual history and cultural history. In M. Kammen (Ed.), The past before us: Contemporary historical writing in the United States (pp. 327–354). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Darnton, R. (1984). The great cat massacre and other episodes in French cultural history. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Darnton, R. (1986). The symbolic element in history. Journal of Modern History, 58, 218–234.

Darnton, R. (2007). “What is the history of books?” revisited. Modern Intellectual History, 4, 495–508.

Davis, N. (1983). The return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Douglas, S. (1999/2004). Listening in: Radio and the American imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Douglas, S. (2008). Does textual analysis tell us anything about past audiences? In B. Zelizer (Ed.), Explorations in communication history (pp. 66–76). New York, NY: Routledge.

Eley, G. (2005). A crooked line: From cultural history to the history of society. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Enstad, N. (2008). On grief and complicity: Notes toward a visionary cultural history. In J. W. Cook, L. B. Glickman, & M. O'Malley (Eds.), The cultural turn in US history (pp. 319–341). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, M. (1971/2010). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. New York, NY: Vintage.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Genovese, E. D. (1974). Roll, Jordan, roll: The world that slaves made. New York, NY: Pantheon.

Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Ginzburg, C. (1980). The cheese and the worms: The cosmos of a sixteenth-century miller. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gitlin, T. (1978). Media sociology: The dominant paradigm. Theory and Society, 6, 205–253.

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York, NY: International.

Hale, G. E. (1998). Making Whiteness: The culture of segregation in the South, 1890–1940. New York, NY: Vintage.

Hall, D. D. (1996). Cultures of print: Essays in the history of the book. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Hall, S. (1980). Cultural studies and the centre: Some problematics and problems. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–1979 (pp. 15–47). London, UK: Hutchinson.

Hall, S. (1981). Notes on deconstructing “the popular.” In R. Samuel (Ed.), People's history and socialist theory (pp. 227–239). London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Hoganson, K. L. (2007). Consumers' imperium: The global production of American domesticity, 1865–1920. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (1972). Dialectic of enlightenment. New York, NY: Herder & Herder.

Hunt, L. (1989). Introduction. In L. Hunt (Ed.), The new cultural history. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Jay, M. (2011). In the realm of the senses: An introduction. American Historical Review, 116, 307–315.

Kaestle, C. F., & Radway, J. A. (2009). A framework for the history of publishing and reading in the United States, 1880–1940. In C. F. Kaestle & J. A. Radway (Eds.), A history of the book in America. Vol. 4: Print in motion (pp. 7–21). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Kahrl, A. W. (2008). “The slightest semblance of unruliness”: Steamboat excursions, pleasure resorts, and the emergence of segregation culture on the Potomac River. Journal of American History, 94, 1108–1136.

Kaplan, A. (1993). “Left alone with America”: The absence of empire in the study of American culture. In A. Kaplan & D. E. Pease (Eds.), Cultures of United States imperialism (pp. 3–21). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Kasson, J. F. (1978). Amusing the million: Coney Island at the turn of the century. New York, NY: Hill & Wang.

Kelley, R. D. G. (1992). Notes on deconstructing “the folk.” American Historical Review, 97, 1400–1408.

Kelley, R. D. G. (1994). Race rebels: Culture, politics, and the Black working class. New York, NY: Free Press.

Lears, T. J. J. (1985). The concept of cultural hegemony: Problems and possibilities. American Historical Review, 90, 567–593.

Lears, T. J. J. (1992). Making fun of popular culture. American Historical Review, 97, 1417–1426.

Lears, T. J. J. (1994). Fables of abundance: A cultural history of advertising in America. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Levine, L. H. (1992). The folklore of industrial society: Popular culture and its audiences. American Historical Review, 97, 1369–1399.

Marchand, R. (1998). Creating the corporate soul: The rise of pubic relations and corporate imagery in American big business. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

McAlister, M. (2001). Epic encounters: Culture, media, and US interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Megill, A. (1987). The reception of Foucault by historians. Journal of the History of Ideas, 48, 117–141.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2002). Showing seeing: A critique of visual culture. In N. Mirzoeff (Ed.), The visual culture reader (2nd ed.) (pp. 86–101). New York, NY: Routledge.

Nord, D. P. (1988). A plea for journalism history. Journalism History, 15, 8–15.

Nord, D. P. (2008). The history of journalism and the history of the book. In B. Zelizer (Ed.), Explorations in communication history (pp. 162–180). New York, NY: Routledge.

Reckwitz, A. (2005). Toward a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing. In G. M. Spiegel (Ed.), Practicing history: New directions in historical writing after the linguistic turn (pp. 245–263). New York, NY: Routledge.

Rodgers, D. T. (2011). Age of fracture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rosaldo, R. (1988). Ideology, place, and people without culture. Cultural Anthropology, 3, 77–87.

Rosenzweig, R. (1983). Eight hours for what we will: Workers in an industrial city, 1870–1920. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage.

Scott, J. W. (1986). Gender: A useful category of historical analysis. American Historical Review, 91, 1053–1075.

Scott, J. W. (1991). The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry, 17, 773–797.

Sewell, W. H., Jr. (2005). Logics of history: Social theory and social transformation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Spiegel, G. M. (2005). Introduction. In G. M. Spiegel (Ed.), Practicing history: New directions in historical writing after the linguistic turn (pp. 1–31). New York, NY: Routledge.

Spiegel, G. M. (2008). Comment on A Crooked Line. American Historical Review, 113, 406–416.

Suisman, D. (2009). Selling sounds: The commercial revolution in American music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Thompson, E. P. (1963). The making of the English working class. New York, NY: Vintage.

Thompson, E. P. (1977). Folklore, anthropology, and social history. Indian Historical Review, 3, 247–266.

Walters, R. G. (1980). Signs of the times: Clifford Geertz and the historians. Social Research, 47, 537–556.

Weber, M. (1968). Basic sociological terms. In Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.) (pp. 3–24). New York, NY: Bedminster.

Williams, R. (1961). The long revolution. London, UK: Chatto & Windus.

Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Williams, R. (1980). Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory. In Problems in materialism and culture (pp. 31–49). London, UK: Verso.