Peter Burke, Professor of cultural History at the University of Cambridge, made a lecture on new cultural history and had a discussion on the development of European historical writing with Professor Yang Yu and some students of History Department Nanjing Univcrsity during his visit in China in Scptcmber, 1999.New cultural history, or socio\|cultural history, is one of the most important cultural turns in historical writings since 1970s. Its topic include material culture, history of body, memory and image, and political cultural history, etc. As a intellectual movement, new cultural history is a reaction against New History and quantitative history, because professional historians are no longer dissatisfied with their determinism. And the assumption behind the new cultural history is to seek a greater degree of human freedom. He points out that a simplistic voluntarism, i.e. to assume that we can construct or invent ourselves, social group or our nation as if no social and cultural limitaions, is the problem for the new cultural historians now. As an historian, Peter Burke doesn’t think philosophy, such as the postmodernism has a direct influence on historical writings.
