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The theme of this issue of the Urban History Review/Revue d'histoire urbaine is "The New Cultural History and Urban History," a theme intended to answer a question about the place of the city in a recent trend in historical research. The aim of this issue is to demonstrate where the new cultural history offers insights for urban history. The articles in this issue demonstrate this potential, each in its own way. Yet, at the same time, each also suggests to cultural historians that studies grounded in the urban past help illuminate many of the broader questions that interest them. Among the basic assumptions underlying this issue is the belief that, for much of Western civilization in the 20th century, the city has been more than a scene for cultural expression. That is, the culture of modernity, a culture involving rapid social change, commodification, mass society, and fragmentation, did not just develop in the city. It is a culture of the city. This, I suggest, has been a missing element in the explosion of new research into such topics as historical memory, consumerism, and ritual, grouped together loosely as the "New Cultural History."(1)
Of course, it is difficult to nail a definition of the new cultural history to the wall. The new cultural history is neither a school nor a movement. It is not a single approach and it does not encapsulate a specific methodology. Rather, the new cultural history represents a change in focus from looking for historical causation to exploring the meanings of things and events. It examines culture as a series of signifiers and, following Clifford Geertz, claims "the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."(2) New cultural historians, then, see their work as a way of understanding the past that emphasizes the ways that groups and individuals, in competition with one another, construct the meanings that guide their interpretations of the material world. Moreover, competition suggests that meaning is constructed in a plurality of ways and that there can be more than one meaning ascribed to the same event. No cultural event or artifact in this understanding has a monolithic meaning. This is an understanding of...