Outlining a postmodern historiography, this work charts the move from social history to new practices of cultural history that are drawing strength from poststructuralist interpretive strategies and raising issues found in feminist and postcolonialist discourse. The author provides readings of theorists and their work, including Lawrence Stone on family; Francois Furet on the French Revolution; Michel de Certeau on consumerism; and Michel Foucault on intellectual history. Key themes animate Poster's work: the often irreducible difference between past and present; the relationship of writing and representation to power and domination; the dissolving distinctions between high and low culture, production and consumption, and reality and fiction; and a new perspective on human agency and the construction of political subjects. The growth of electronic communication also prompts Poster to reassess the historians task, since it reconfigures the relation of human to machine, mind to body, and the writing subject to the text.