Dear Colleagues,

In the 1980s, in response to the crisis of social history, advocates of the “New Cultural History” proposed a new paradigm for studying the past. Drawing on the work of structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers from a variety of disciplines, new cultural historians analyzed texts, images and practices to identify systems of thought and belief. By the turn of the twentieth century, New Cultural History had reached its own crisis point. Both critics and practitioners expressed concern at a lack of standard definitions and methodology as well as a tendency to focus on representations divorced from social practices. Including cultural history within a larger critique of postmodernism, skeptics and adherents alike asked whether cultural history was able to bring to light any objective “truth” about the past. Yet despite this criticism, cultural history has continued to develop as a distinct approach to the past, as historians turn to new topics (emotions, memory) and draw from diverse disciplines (cultural geography, neurobiology). This special issue asks whether it is possible, twenty-five or so years after the “cultural turn,” to speak of cultural history as a coherent field. Are the criticisms of cultural history made in the late 1990s still valid? How has new technology altered cultural historical approaches? What might we gain by thinking of cultural history as a field, and what might we lose? This special issue asks authors to submit articles based on their own original research that speak to these questions concerning the state of the field.

Dr. Victoria Thompson
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• culture
• cultural history
• New Cultural History
• interdisciplinary
• structuralism
• poststructuralism
• historical methodology
• postmodernism
• thought
• belief