There is at the present time no general collection of readings on cultural history, yet historians and practitioners of related disciplines have over the past few years devoted a large amount of attention to the challenge of placing cultural continuity and change in the foreground of their efforts to understand the past. The Cultural History Reader aims to provide a survey of texts both about cultural history to put these developments in context and texts which form the basis of this cultural history. Consisting of 12 parts, a Prologue and an Epilogue, each section also has a contextualising introduction to ground the individual chapters and position them within the development of Cultural History. The Prologue defines Cultural History and sketches its recent development and its antecedents, and focuses on a number of important contributors to the Cultural History debate, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Burke, Natalie Zemon Davis, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz and Lynn Hunt. The sections focus on subjects important in the development of cultural history and provide examples of good cultural history, preceded by remarks on the ways in which the theme has been handled by different cultural historians. The themes of the eleven sections are: oral and literate cultures; culture and technology; space, time and measurement; work and commerce; religion; childhood; gender; individuality; popular culture; cross-cultural encounters; and war. Throughout these introductory sections and the chosen extracts themselves, The Cultural History Reader demonstrates the distinctive contributions made by cultural historians to the range of historiographical methods and illustrates the insights to be gained from analyses of how cultural factors have shaped people's experience of the world and guided their actions. An essentail resource for students of cultural history.