ABSTRACT
Social history became a popular, and even dominant, subdiscipline within history starting in the 1960s. Cultural history has sought to dig beneath external, topical manifestations of "culture" evident in arts and literature, as well as law and science, to unearth "the codes, clues, hints, signs, gestures, and artifacts through which people communicate their values and their truths." Social and cultural history reflects many core historiographical concerns and approaches to historical sources. While they are related in some ways, they also reflect diverging priorities and worldviews. If social history came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s, cultural history emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, and was related to postmodernism and cultural and literary studies. Developments in the field of anthropology—especially as affected by various postmodern sensibilities—have been particularly important in the growth and foci of cultural history.
