History is an invention in the present, as much as a representation and interpretation of the past. This has opened up innovative approaches to the research and writing of history, and it is the two ideas central to this theme - that culture is historically conditioned and history culturally conditioned - that this book explores. Both theoretical and practical in its approach, this volume explains the development of cultural history, and its impact on current teaching. Part One examines the ways in which conceptions of historical meaning have been challenged via developments in a range of disciplines (including literary and linguistic theory, history, sociology, anthropology, media and cultural studies). Part Two looks at four case studies drawn from America and Britain: the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, the music of the Beatles, the social documentary of George Orwell, and the political polemics of nineteenth-century British radical women.

T. G. Ashplant is Reader in Social and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores. His research interests include the relationships between masculinity, class and politics; the use of psychoanalysis in historical writing; life-history analysis as a historical method; and working-class autobiographies. He is co-editor of Explorations in Cultural History (with Gerry Smyth; Pluto, 2001) and The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (with Graham Dawson and Michael Roper; Routledge, 2000).

Gerry Smyth (14 September 1961) is an academic and musician from Dublin, Ireland. He works in the Department of English at Liverpool John Moores University. His early publications were mainly in the field of Irish literature, although since 2002 he has been writing almost exclusively on music. Smyth was an early advocate of postcolonial criticism in Irish Studies, although more recently he has been keen to emphasise the autobiographical dimension of critical discourse. Decolonisation and Criticism won the American Conference for Irish Studies’ Michael J. Durkan Prize for best book published in literary criticism, arts criticism or cultural studies in 1999. Beautiful Day: Forty Years of Irish Rock (co-authored with Sean Campbell) was launched in the Clarence Hotel in Dublin in September 2005. Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Contemporary Culture (co-edited with Jo Croft) was launched at the Tate Liverpool in September 2006. Smyth has lectured throughout Europe and the United States on various aspects of Irish culture. In September / October 2006 he was Academic-in-Residence at the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco.