The Social Turn

"What happened to their assumption that cultural history was crucial to comprehending America, past and present? Basically, the post-World War II conceptions of what constituted both culture and history crumbled in the 1970s. The civil-rights and women's movements, together with the more-relaxed immigration laws that inspired a new wave of ethnic migration, largely from Latin America and Asia, forced historians to ask: Whose culture? Whose history? The answers led not only to a sharper focus on the social history of those groups previously neglected by scholars and teachers, but also to an anthropological definition of culture. What counted now was the culture of daily life—how people behaved in saloons and department stores, what kinds of clothes and cosmetics they bought, whether they were active or passive when they listened to the radio, and above all how they were manipulated by the ideology of consumerism. That approach affected not just historians, but scholars in American studies as well."

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Richard Pells criticizes the current supremacy of social history.