Cultural History Searches for New Directions

These thirteen essays and an epilogue emerged from a 2005 conference in honor of pioneering cultural historian, the late Lawrence Levine. Child of the Depression, active in civil rights, Levine strove to uncover the richness of meanings that ordinary people gave to their lives. His book Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977) explored music, dance, religious practices, jokes, and folklore to establish black culture as a distinctive blend of African traditions and American patterns resistant to the oppressive power of plantation slavery. High Brow, Low Brow (1988) empathized with nineteenth-century lower-class anarchic theater-goers against the genteel patrons of high culture, while his essays on the 1930s plumbed the expressive arts to understand how Depression-ravaged Americans coped with economic devastation. Like many first-generation cultural historians, he sympathized with the New Left and the civil rights movement and came to cultural history out of dissatisfaction with the social science and quantitative approaches that dominated social history. Seeking the voices of the inarticulate, he and his contemporaries empathized with oppositional cultures and helped to legitimize the political insurgencies from which they sprang.

As Cook and Glickman's introductory essay points out, a second wave of cultural historians emerged in the mid-1980s, arguing that the focus on opposition and agency had gone too far. By the late 1980s and 1990s, younger scholars starting out as cultural historians questioned the sameness of community studies and local struggles. They were more concerned with discourse and with people's complicity in their own subordination. Influenced by Foucault, they shifted the focus from autonomous subaltern cultures to the construction of cultural categories. This new wave challenged the clear division between subaltern resistance and the domination of the powerful by embedding subaltern groups in a web of power relations rooted in culture, but they also opened the door to border crossings between categories. At the same time, cultural history invaded most other fields of history. Amid this success and a sense of crisis, where does cultural history stand now? To answer, this volume offers eight examples of current work and four essays that set agendas for the future.

The essays are organized chronologically, most are empathetic, only a few are discursive. Like Levine's focus on outsiders, Ann Fabian's "A Native Among the Headhunters" empathizes with William Brooks, the Oregon Flathead Chinook Indian who converted to Methodism and learned English. In 1838 he accompanied his sponsor to Philadelphia, the land of the "headhunters"—those scientists and phrenologists who collected skulls and saw his flattened head as a key to understanding human development. Fabian sympathizes with Brooks, who established that the civilized headhunters were the real savages; but she also notes that they had the "contested" power to categorize and brutalize Native Americans. While a sparkling essay, it remains unclear whether the point is resistance, the racial origins of American science, or imperialism. The most rhetoric-oriented essay, Michael O'Malley's "Rags, Blacking, and Paper Soldiers: Money and Race in the Civil War," uses blackface minstrel songs like "How are You Greenbacks!" to dissect the twin discourses of race and paper money, which was introduced in the 1860s at the time of emancipation. The rhetoric of paper money reflected insecurity over the loss of fixed standards, which included whites' anxiety over black soldiers' transcending their slave status in the racial hierarchy. Paper money meant easy credit and entrepreneurialism, but Americans were ambivalent because credit caused speculation and loss. Similarly, ex-slaves were claiming equality with whites. Both discourses showed that Americans distrusted individualism and the market along with racial change, but who was most anxious remains unclear. Seemingly the most concerned were Democrats, but what does it mean that many Democrats converted to inflated currency in the 1890s? Did this influence the attempt to fix racial status via formal segregation?

In "The Envelope, Please," Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen...