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Interpretive sociology, symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and ethnomethodology taken together represent the social interaction perspective. The social interaction perspective brings to the fore problems that might be sidestepped in a more objectivist framework. In order to sketch a consistent approach to cultural history, this chapter consolidates the insights of the social interaction perspective around key problems of historiography. It considers four central problems of cultural history that need to be addressed. First, definitions of culture, series, and sequence as key concepts offer an initial basis for specifying an interactionist model of cultural history. Second, there is a need to clarify the nature of the historical object (sometimes called the “historical individual”) and how it is constituted in historical analysis. Finally, the chapter examines the nature both of sociological explanation and of historical explanation, and the roles they might play in the study of cultural history. The chapter thus uses the social interaction perspective as a tool for clarifying analysis of culture, as well as the boundaries and working relationships between history and sociology.

On November 6, 2001, the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage (CPUCH) was signed in Paris, France, with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation; or, UNESCO. When entered into force, it will apply to ‘all traces of human existence having a cultural, historical, or archaeological character, which have been partially or totally under water, periodically or continuously, for at least 100 years’. To explain the merit of the CPUCH, a basic consideration must be made. Any attempts to deal with the cultural heritage at sea inevitably have to face an unexpected obstacle; that is Article 303 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC). This provision is not only incomplete but also counterproductive, and can be interpreted in a way which undermines the very objective of protecting the underwater cultural heritage. This chapter looks at some of the issues surrounding Article 303, including the law of salvage and finds, ‘first come, first served’ approach for archaeological and historical objects found on the continental shelf, regional cooperation, and freedom of the seas.

This chapter examines the poetics and politics of the “digital” historical object, and offers a different interpretation of the relationship between virtual and material objects and more abstract concepts of materiality, authority, interpretation, aura and authenticity, representation, affect, knowledge, experience, and value. It looks at prevailing debates and bifurcations used to describe and define historical collections and virtual/digital “historical” objects, and shows how an object-centered museum culture and material culture paradigms have bounded digital historical collections. The chapter argues that the roles and uses of the digital object must be understood as part of the broader heritage complex—an institutionalized culture of practices and ideas which is inherently political in nature, socially and culturally circumscribed. It also rejects the formalist notions of materiality and technology that make digital objects fit into the specific rubric of “replicant,” and which have constrained their value, meaning, and imaginative uses.

This chapter investigates the ways that historians use photographs, questioning how photographs both establish and overcome categorical definitions of history through “presence.” Unlike other documents and artifacts, historical photographs uniquely lend themselves to a historical gaze that renders them “present” in a universalizing, familiarizing, and ultimately objectifying manner. The chapter engages with the theorists of “presence” but also casts its gaze back to the work of Wilhelm Dilthey to provide a philosophy of history that supports appreciation for a “mind-constructed” world of presence. In this way the chapter endeavors to move photographs from the category of self-evident historical object and into a more metaphysically risky realm of historical knowledge.

Historical objects are made meaningful in relation to the narratives that they represent and substantiate, the literary historiography that animates the past's more material form. The material of Sikh history, therefore, only makes sense as part of a larger historiographical project that we can recuperate mainly in its literary forms. This chapter explores precolonial and early colonial period literary representations of the past to reconstruct how history has been imagined and represented in Sikh terms. By understanding the representation of the past in Sikh tradition in literary terms, we come to understand what is at stake in the representation of the past as object and as site, and how they participate in a larger historical imaginary. The focus is on how the texts themselves understand and construct the past, through memory and into history. It is shown that textual representations and material ones participate together in a shared articulation of the community of the Gurus through the represented past.

This book examines the tradition of collecting historical relics in the United States over the course of the nineteenth century, focusing on the practices by middle class whites. It looks at the relic as a form of representation as well as its origins in popular collecting. It suggests that historical relics are linked to the cognate form of the sentimental token, and that their function is therefore very different from the kinds of historical objects that would later be showcased in museums. It also discusses the collecting of articles from the Civil War and considers the decline of the relic in both popular and professional collecting, along with the representational norms that came to replace it.

This concluding chapter focuses on the modernism of the design of urban spaces. It discusses how the design and realization of a historical object effected a connection between the nation’s past and its present. It argues that the Monumento a Martí could manifest the ideality of the Cuban nation in the singular contemporaneity of its citizen subjects. The object itself was not only symbolic of an overwhelming historical circumstances but it encouraged its audience to identify itself as a collective of historical subjects endowed with civic consciousness. The historicity of the Monumento a Martí was a historical consciousness condensed into an experience not merely of temporality, but of presentness.