Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-252) and index.

1. Introduction -- 2. Social history & the discursive move -- 3. A species of modernism -- 4. Materialism & disavowal : from the social to the cultural? -- 5. What is the valency of class now? -- 6.Conclusions.

"Unifying concepts are essential when studying history. They provide students and scholars with ways to organize their thoughts, research, and writings. However, these concepts are also the focus of myriad conflicts within the field. Social history has experienced more than its share of such conflicts since its inception some forty years ago. In recent times the fields of “the social” and of “culture” have sometimes been presented as mutually exclusive and even hostile. Once again, conceptual innovation in history has been cast as a closure by which the new drives out the old: in this case, cultural history radically displacing social history. "The Future of Class in History" analyzes the effect of the conflict that followed the “turn to culture” in historical work by examining the use of class and demonstrates how practitioners in multiple fields can collaborate to produce the highest quality scholarship." -- Cover.