One of the most dramatic shifts in our discipline between the 1960s and the 1980s was the increasing number of professional historians who began to describe themselves as "new social historians" and see their work as borrowing from or brushing up against one or another social science discipline. Then, beginning in the 1980s, the percentage of professional historians who claimed an affiliation with the "new cultural history" started to grow markedly. And this in turn led to novel ideas about connections between history and neighboring fields, including branches of the humanities such as literary criticism. In Beyond the Cultural Turn, the participants sought to illuminate these two related waves of transformation within history, while also asking where study of society and culture may now be heading in their wake. The 1999 volume did so by bringing together essays by a diverse set of scholars, who study different times and places yet share a common interest in the borderlands between disciplines and the complex relationship between "social" and "cultural" modes of analysis. Most of the contributors are either sociologists (Richard Biernacki and co-editor Victoria E. Bonnell) or historians (Caroline Walker Bynum, Jerrold Seigel, Karen Halttunen, Margaret C. Jacob, Hayden White, and co-editor Lynn Hunt). The others are scholars who have links to both of these disciplines (Margaret Somers, Steven Feierman, William H. Sewell, Jr., and Sonya O. Rose). Thus what emerged was a dialogue—the tone for which is set in a wide-ranging "Introduction" by Bonnell and Hunt—that is structured around the concerns of history and sociology, as well as the ever-shifting gray areas between these two disciplines.

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The review essays that follow were commissioned with an eye toward expanding the discussion beyond the disciplines of the co-editors, in an effort to see how the relationship between the "social" and the "cultural" and recent changes in historical practice look when viewed from other intellectual borderlands. This explains why most of the discussion to come focuses on those chapters in Beyond the Cultural Turn, such as the ones by Sewell and Biernacki that open the book, which make the broadest arguments about definitions and methods. The first of the three pieces is by Ronald Suny, a specialist in Russian and Soviet history who currently teaches in a department of political science. The second is by Patrick Brantlinger, a specialist in Victorian studies whose home is a department of English. The third is by Richard Handler, an anthropologist whose work has tended to focus on historical issues. Each author was asked both to assess the arguments in Beyond the Cultural Turn itself and also invited to use that book as a starting point for a broader consideration of disciplinary genealogies and the relationships between fields. Together, the essays suggest a breadth of disciplinary approaches to the study of culture.

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