Cultural history facts for kids
Cultural history is a way of studying the past. It combines ideas from anthropology (the study of human societies and cultures) and history (the study of past events). It looks at how people lived, thought, and created things in different times. This includes everything from everyday life to big events. Cultural history helps us understand the stories and records of what happened in the past. It shows how a group's arts, customs, and ways of living have changed over time.
Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) from Switzerland helped start cultural history as a field of study. He looked at how people lived in the Italian Renaissance. Cultural history explores the different ways people have lived. It studies past activities like ceremonies, traditions, and how people interacted with their surroundings.
What is Cultural History?
Many historians today see cultural history as a fresh approach. But historians like Jacob Burckhardt were already talking about it in the 1800s. He studied the Italian Renaissance in a new way. He looked at not just art and buildings, but also the economy and daily life. Later, Johan Huizinga used a similar approach in his book The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919).
Cultural history often focuses on things shared by regular people, not just leaders. This includes things like:
- Carnivals, festivals, and public rituals.
- Storytelling traditions like tales and epic poems.
- How human ideas, sciences, arts, and skills have changed.
- How social movements, like nationalism, are expressed culturally.
Cultural history also looks at big ideas like power, ideology, social class, and cultural identity. It examines how traditional culture has adapted to mass media. This includes things like television, radio, newspapers, and the Internet. Modern cultural history uses ideas from art history, the Annales School, and microhistory.
Cultural Studies
Cultural studies is an academic field that brings together many different subjects. It combines ideas from political economy, sociology, literary theory, and art history. Researchers in cultural studies look at cultural things in different societies. They often focus on how a specific cultural event or trend connects to ideas about ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, or gender.
The term "cultural studies" was first used by Richard Hoggart in 1964. He started the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Later, Stuart Hall became very important to this field.
See also
In Spanish: Historia cultural para niños
- Collective unconscious
- Ethnohistory
- History of mentalities
- Human history
