Introduction: History, Culture, and Text

‘Sunless lives’: District nurses’ and journalists’ co-construction of the ‘sick poor’ as a vulnerable population in early twentieth-century New Zealand

“…Cultural historians use concepts from social anthropology, such as the emphasis on shared meanings and understandings within a cultural group, and from literary theory, such as the focus on exploring tropes or metaphors used in public discourse (Hunt, 1989). This research interpreted the shared meanings associated with vulnerability and the sick poor, and how these were constructed through the choice of tropes in their public representations in newspapers and professional journals.…”

Mind and Matter--Cultural Analysis in American Military History: A Look at the State of the Field

“…Cultural historians have transformed mentalité from the product of longer-term material structures into itself a structuring force. 69 Doing so implied a potentially infinite explosion of subjects, and therefore of subjectivities, worthy of consideration as structures within history. This multiplicity of subjectivities, however, is hard to square with the history of (recent) military experience, in which an intensely hierarchical decision-making structure limited the number of mentalités in play and in which one finds strongly repetitive patterns in military behavior, implying the existence of shared mentalités.…”

Histories*

“…This occurred at a moment when literary theory was informing both disciplines and when Geertz himself was taking a textual turn. In the 'cultural history' advocated by Lynn Hunt and Chartier, one sees a partiality for modified deconstructionist and narratological theories and a full textual awareness which is attentive to complex patterns of communication (Nussdorfer, 1993;Hunt, 1989;Chartier, 1988).…”