ABSTRACT
Since the 1960s the discipline of history has grudgingly made room for the new genre of "social history". In the 1980s another new genre has emerged among historians, this one called "cultural history". The turn to social history also meant in particular a preference for "history from below", as its premier practitioner, E. P. Thompson, termed it. This apparent change in direction, a focus on the bottom of the social order rather than a view from above, nonetheless retained a humanist view of the historical agent. In both the "old" political-intellectual history and the "new" social history, the historian sought to attain the truth about the "real". The records examined by the historian - diplomatic correspondence or local archives - were taken as transparent mediations between the past and the present. The new cultural history upsets this configuration of truth. It often does so by resorting to poststructuralist interpretive strategies and raising the issue of feminist and anticolonial discourse.
