Bloomsbury New Directions in Social and Cultural History

What does it mean to be a social and cultural historian today? In the wake of the cultural turn, and in an age of digital and public history, what challenges and opportunities await historians in the early 21st century? In this exciting new text, leading historians reflect on key developments in their fields and argue for a range of new directions in social and cultural history. Focusing on emerging areas of historical research such as the history of the emotions and environmental history, New Directions in Social and Cultural History is an invaluable guide to the current and future state of the field. The book is divided into three clear sections, each with an editorial introduction, and covering key thematic areas: histories of the human, the material world, and challenges and provocations. Each chapter in the collection provides an introduction to the key and recent developments in its specialist field, with their authors then moving on to argue for what they see as particularly important shifts and interventions in the theory and methodology and suggest future developments. New Directions in Social and Cultural History provides a comprehensive and insightful overview of this burgeoning field which will be important reading for all students and scholars of social and cultural history and historiography. Review An impressive, well-written volume that not only addresses the current state of play in social and cultural history, but relates it to influential political and intellectual movements and points to future trends. It will be an extremely useful volume for students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. --June Purvis, Emeritus Professor of Women's and Gender History, University of Portsmouth, UK About the Author Sasha Handley is Lecturer in Early Modern Cultural History at the University of Manchester, UK.Rohan McWilliam is Senior Lecturer in History at Anglia Ruskin University and author of Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England and the editor (with Kelly Boyd) of The Victorian Studies Reader (2007).Lucy Noakes is Rab Butler Chair of Modern History at the University of Essex, UK.