I'm interested in finding information about cultural history

Re: I'm interested in finding information about cultural his

Hello Mosheb and welcome,

Your question does not have an easy answer, because the mindframe of people at any given moment in time is very much influenced by a myriad of environmental factors, like religious beliefs, local traditions, scientific knowledge, language, philosophy, social strata and what have you. It would be easier to give an answer if you mentioned a specific place and moment in time.

Perhaps our fellow member Setanta has more to say about this.

thats just the point. I don't want a certain place or time. What I what is somebody that wrote on the laws (or so called ones) that regulate the flow of public opinion (moral opinion, etc.). Of course, this will have to be done by looking at diffeerent places and times. but didn't somebodey try to work all these problems into some coherent whole, or at least try to? and I don't really know other members...

My comment would be that most of history takes no notice of the "common" man and woman, and there would be, therefore, few resources for you to consult. Most of what can be said, can only be derived by inference, and then is of dubious value. It is only within the last century that a handful of historians have had any interest in the subject, and chiefly have investigated records in the western world, that of Europe and the "New World." Studies of manor court records from Europe in the middle ages, and tax records, chruch birth, baptismal and marriage records, and the comparison of all of these records lead to a few tenative statements which may be made.

By ane large, one is obliged to admit that history concerns itself little with the "common" man, and a great deal with the famous, infamous and the notorious.

Your research term is then too broad and too vague and as Setanta mentioned there are very few and scattered records by which to go.

I suggest you would limit your research to a defined period with defined research aspects. If, for example, you would choose public opinion on a limited number of subjects in the US since the second World War. You might find sufficient sources and you could for example study how the the cinema and later, the advent of TV has influenced opinion forming. Once you arrive at that point you might be able to say something meaningful about the mechanisms at work and see if you can apply your findings on other places and time periods to test their universal validity (because that is what I believe you seek).

I wish you success.

thank everybody for there support, but I am nw in a big library and I actually found sort of what I was looking for. There is a very big subject here called "social change", with a few hundred titles at least. The main problem is, that this could take me years to go over...

Re: I'm interested in finding information about cultural his



Start with Norbert Elias:

His great book, which marked his emergence as a major figure in sociology, was the republication in paperback of "The Civilizing Process" (Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, published in 1939 but virtually ignored, republished in the 1960s when it was also translated into English).

The first volume traced the historical developments of the European habitus, or "second nature," the particular individual psychic structures molded by social attitudes. Elias traced how post-medieval European standards applied to violence, sexual behaviour, bodily functions, table manners and forms of speech were transformed by increasing threshholds of shame and repugnance, working outward from a nucleus in court etiquette.

The second volume of The Civilizing Process looked into the causes of these processes and found them in the increasingly centralized Early Modern state and the increasingly differentiated and interconnected web of society.

You might consider Durkheim & Weber as well.

Environmental Sociology
(as cached in the Wayback Machine)

the reciprocal interactions between the physical environment, social organization, and social behavior, past, present and future.

a linkfarm of resources

its my opinion that a "culture" is at its lowest level the "survival strategy" of a group, culture's have and continue to go astray of their core strategy and eventually perish, failing to adapt to changing circumstances