In 1961, Michel Foucault published his first major work, a history of madness from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.Histoire de la foliestood outside the paradigms of the new social history. Neither Marxist nor Annaliste, Foucault’s work in the intervening quarter century has been alternately praised and attacked by historians—and most often, in both cases, misunderstood. The body of Foucault’s writing has seldom been recognized for what it is: an alternative model for writing the history of culture, a model that embodies a fundamental critique of Marxist and Annaliste analysis, of social history itself.

In the decade...

In the early 19705, social historians struggled to expand their investigations beyond the demographic and socioeconomic analysis of lower-class life to explore popular cultural perceptions as well. Seeking to give voice and life to the peasants, workers, and artisans they studied, historians enriched their quantitative portrait by the study ofmentalités. Two historians, E. P, Thompson and Natalie Davis, were extremely influential in providing the cultural analysis of popular behavior and attitudes with direction, validity, and method. Their work on crowd violence in particular became integral to the definition and formation of a new cultural approach to social history.

Thompson...

Genres are “blurring,” Clifford Geertz has said.¹ For every historian who cites Braudel’s summons tola science sociale, there is an anthropologist reminding us of Maitland’s well-known dictum: that anthropology will be history or it will be nothing at all. Historians regularly acknowledge the influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and, in particular, Clifford Geertz. And now, at the very moment when the “Annales paradigm” is most controversial,² Marshall Sahlins, a highly visible anthropologist, chooses to employ Braudel’s termlongue duréeto mean Lévi-Strauss’s “structure.” For Sahlins, as will be shown, the “long run” of Hawaiian history consists...

Historical writing in the twentieth century has evolved through institutional and intellectual patterns that have produced a perennial historiographical tension. The dominant institutional pattern has been the tendency of historians to define themselves along the increasingly precise lines of academic departments, limited specializations, and disciplinary boundaries. At the same time, however, much of the intellectual innovation among modern historians has resulted from their willingness to draw on other academic disciplines for theoretical and methodological insights, which has led to an expansion and redefinition of the political orientation of traditional historiography. The search for new approaches to the past has led...

TheSan Francisco Morning Callbegan its report on the July Fourth celebration of 1864 with this perfunctory comment: “The chief feature of the day was the great Procession of course.” By mid morning, the editor went on, “the streets began to be thronged with platoons, companies and regiments of soldiers, benevolent associations etc., swarming from every point of the compass and marching with music and banners toward the general rendezvous like the gathering hosts of a mighty army.” An hour later these contingents of citizens had formed into a linear sequence and proceeded to file through the principal streets...

In the prologue to hisCelestina, published in Saragossa in 1507, Fernando de Rojas asked himself why the work had been understood, appreciated, and used in so many different ways since its first appearance in 1499 at Burgos.¹ The question is simple: how can a text that is the same for everyone who reads it become an “instrument of discord and battle between its readers, creating divergences between them, with each reader having an opinion depending on his own taste?” (instrumento de lid o contienda a sus lectores para ponerlos en diferencias, dando cada una sentencia sobre ella a sabor...

This essay asks how details about the suffering bodies of others engender compassion and how that compassion comes to be understood as a moral imperative to undertake ameliorative action. It is about the origins of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century humanitarianism.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, a new cluster of narratives came to speak in extraordinarily detailed fashion about the pains and deaths of ordinary people in such a way as to make apparent the causal chains that might connect the actions of its readers with the suffering of its subjects. This aesthetic enterprise, various forms of which I will consider under...

Over the past few years I have been looking with an art historian at pictures in the surviving council halls and audience rooms of medieval and Renaissance Italy. These rooms of state and their decorations are sites where art—especially painting—and politics were programmatically conjoined in three different centuries under three different regimes: civic republics in the fourteenth century, princely courts in the fifteenth, and “triumphalist” states in the sixteenth. In looking at the pictures, I am especially interested in seeing how regimes of power correspond to regimes of symbolic practice or, more precisely, how different artistic styles and...