What is the History of Popular Culture? (iii)

Cultural history is one of the most complex and demanding branches of historical endeavour. For it requires its practitioners to be equipped not just with the training and tools of the historian but also the analytical skills of the expert in literature and art, the methodological equipment of the sociologist and the conceptual sophistication of the political theorist. The work of the cultural historian, as Raymond Williams argued in his influential book The Long Revolution, is to elucidate the meanings and values implicit and explicit in the art, literature, learning, institutions and everyday behaviour within a given society.