Cultural history examines how societies construct meaning through everyday practices, symbols, and material goods, diverging significantly from traditional political history’s focus on statecraft and elite men. For example, while a traditional military historian might analyze the tactical maneuvers of the Napoleonic Wars, cultural historians explore how the period’s shifting social norms shaped daily life. Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre uses obscure working-class folklore to reveal 18th-century French social tensions. For example, the essay collection’s title is derived from its most famous chapter, which analyzes how printers’ apprentices responded to mistreatment by the printers and their families. Feeling the printers treated pet cats better than their apprentices, they intended to launch an early form of workers’ protest by killing the cats. Whether or not it’s true, the story conveys the strong resentment felt by the working class toward the bourgeoisie at the time. Author Tilar J. Mazzeo employs a similar methodology in The Widow Clicquot, reconstructing the life of Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin through the material culture of the champagne industry rather than standard biographical archives.



Because the personal diaries of 19th-century businesswomen rarely survive, Mazzeo relies on broader cultural analysis of business and social trends, commercial records, and the wealth of documentation about the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. She uses this approach to rescue her subject from "the silence that engulfed her story" (xiii), a method that she similarly uses in her other title, The Secret of Chanel No. 5, which also investigates the real life of a woman better known for her brand than her individual identity. Mazzeo’s work is uniquely blended, functioning as both cultural history and business biography. She contextualizes the evolution of champagne as a reflection of shifting cultural identities in post-revolutionary France. By analyzing specific societal elements, such as the social freedom granted specifically to widows and the cultural transformation of champagne into an international symbol of luxury, Mazzeo demonstrates how everyday commodities carry profound historical meaning. This methodological lens ultimately allows an understanding of how a single, marginalized individual navigated and influenced the rigid gender constraints of her era.