This article is concerned with the fortunes of the history of popular culture, presenting a survey organized chronologically from the late eighteenth century to the present, beginning with the middle-class amateurs who collected folksongs and folktales, followed by the professional folklorists and finally, from the 1960s onwards, by historians in France, Britain, the United States, Italy and elsewhere during the rise of cultural studies, cultural anthropology and what was known in the USA as “the New Cultural History”. The article goes on to discuss criticisms of the concept of culture by both anthropologists and historians and the possibility of writing cultural history without the term “culture” by focusing on symbols and performances.