In this stimulating new text, renowned military historian Jeremy Black unpacks the concept of culture as a descriptive and analytical approach to the history of warfare. Black takes the reader through the limits and prospects of culture as a tool for analyzing war, while also demonstrating the necessity of maintaining the context of alternative analytical matrices, such as technology. Black sets out his unique approach to culture and warfare without making his paradigm into a straightjacket. He goes on to demonstrate the flexibility of his argument through a series of case studies which include the contexts of rationale (Gloire), strategy (early modern Britaisn), organizations (the modern West), and ideologies (the Cold War). These case studies drive home the point at the core of the book: culture is not a bumper sticker; it is a survival mechanism. Culture is not immutable; it is adaptable. Wide-ranging, international and always provocative, War and the Cultural Turn will be required reading for all students of military history and security studies.

An account of one of the most dominant trends in recent historical writing, this book takes stock of the field even as it showcases exemplars of its practice. Taken together, the essays present a broad picture of the state of American cultural-historical scholarship.

Nothing has generated more controversy in the social sciences than the turn toward culture, variously known as the linguistic turn, culturalism, or postmodernism. This book examines the impact of the cultural turn on two prominent social science disciplines, history and sociology, and proposes new directions in the theory and practice of historical research. The editors provide an introduction analyzing the origins and implications of the cultural turn and its postmodernist critiques of knowledge. Essays by leading historians and historical sociologists reflect on the uses of cultural theories and show both their promise and their limitations. The afterword by Hayden White provides an assessment of the trend toward culturalism by one its most influential proponents. Beyond the Cultural Turn offers fresh theoretical readings of the most persistent issues created by the cultural turn and provocative empirical studies focusing on diverse social practices, the uses of narrative, and the body and self as critical junctures where culture and society intersect.

Currently, public religion is in a time of flux and the notion of the common good—once associated with the Protestant voice in America—is openly contested by new religious coalitions seeking to communicate their version of the truth and plant their stake in the public domain. This edited volume reflects on the changing tone and form of the public voice of religion, on its function in American society, and on its relationship to the private world of religion. It proposes that public religion, when exercised in a civil and accountable way, can be a responsible and prophetic voice in public life and enrich the American experiment in liberal democracy. The contributors—first-rate scholars including Martin Marty and Robert Belah—focus on public religion's influence on controversial issues such as multiculturalism, economic inequality, abortion, and homosexuality.

In an offhand, never systematically elaborated comment Karl Marx deemed ‘human corporeal organisation’ the ‘first fact for the study of human history’. This book explores the implications of Marx’s radically corporeal insight for historical-materialist analysis of socio-economic and cultural forms.

The book, Objects of War, illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement.― Utah Public Radio Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. And yet the profession tends to be suspicious of things; words are its stock-in-trade. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in flight; objects stolen on battlefields; objects expropriated, reappropriated, and remembered. Objects of War illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement. Chapters consider theft and pillaging as strategies of conquest; soldiers' relationships with their weapons; and the use of clothing and domestic goods by prisoners of war, extermination camp inmates, freed people, and refugees to make claims and to create a kind of normalcy. While studies of migration and material culture have proliferated in recent years, as have histories of the Napoleonic, colonial, World Wars, and postcolonial wars, few have focused on the movement of people and things in times of war across two centuries. This focus, in combination with a broad temporal canvas, serves historians and others well as they seek to push beyond the written word. Contributors: Noah Benninga, Sandra H. Dudley, Bonnie Effros, Cathleen M. Giustino, Alice Goff, Gerdien Jonker, Aubrey Pomerance, Iris Rachamimov, Brandon M. Schechter, Jeffrey Wallen, and Sarah Jones Weicksel

Fredric Jameson, a leading voice on the subject of postmodernism, assembles his most powerful writings on the culture of late capitalism in this essential volume. Classic insights on pastiche, nostalgia, and architecture stand alongside essays on the status of history, theory, Marxism, and the subject in an age propelled by finance capital and endless spectacle. Surveying the debates that blazed up around his earlier essays, Jameson responds to critics and maps out the theoretical positions of postmodernism's prominent friends and foes.