In recent times there has been recognition of the growing influence of cultural theory on historical writing. Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler and Spivak are just some of the thinkers whose ideas have been taken up and deployed by historians. What are these ideas and where do they come from? How have cultural theorists thought about 'history'? And how have historians applied theoretical insights to enhance their own understanding of events in the past? This book provides a wide-ranging and authoritative guide to the often vexed and controversial relationship between history and contemporary theory. It analyses the concepts that concern both theorists and historians, such as power, identity, modernity and postcolonialism, and offers a critical evaluation of them from an historical standpoint. Written in an accessible manner, History and Cultural Theory gives historians and students an invaluable summary of the impact of cultural theory on historiography over the last twenty years, and indicates the likely directions of the subject in the future.

Product Description: Traffic in Towns, also known as the Buchanan Report, is regarded as one of the most influential planning documents of the twentieth century. The report reflected mounting concern about the impact on Britain’s towns and cities of rapid growth in the ownership and use of motor vehicles...read more

Product Description: This is the first guide to the sources, techniques and concepts needed for effective historical research studies.Each chapter introduces a different research method. These range from the well established, such as archival research, to the less widely known, such as Geographical Information Systems, and recent trends, such as textual analysis and material culture studies...read more

Product Description: The public culture of the Victorian middle class looks at the creation of a distinctive "high" culture in the industrial cities of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century and its incipient decline from the 1880s...read more

The rise of the English middle class from the mid-nineteenth century onwards is one of the great untold stories of social history. Many of the most profound cultural changes of the twentieth century - the rise of concepts like professionalism, privacy, respectability, consumerism, the centrality of home - were driven by the inexorable expansion of the suburban middle class. The original BBC2 series (broadcast in early 2001) was rapturously received, combining interviews from over 50 people telling their own stories with comment and analysis by prominent historians and sociologists. The book will share this structure but will explore the subject in much greater depth.

Product Description: Reflecting the growing interest of historians in space and location as objects of analysis, this book is about the historical relationship between urban space and social identity. In urban history there has long been concern with space and place, but recent interest has also been stimulated by specific aspects of postmodern thought deriving from the work of theorists such as Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, as well as more generally from the burgeoning field of cultural geography...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The political blueprint in Europe, from the Netherlands to the Mediterranean, is being rewritten to cope with economic crisis and to enlarge the state's role in business, welfare, immigration and education. As state power over public ownership shrinks, the state is simultaneously appropriating more and more control over information, umderstanding and even over thought itself...read more