Cultural history examines and tries to interpret the leading ideas, beliefs and activities of human societies. Culture used to be defined as solely the higher expressions of the mind: art, literature and learning, things which had some intellectual or moral value, which enriched life and which should be preserved and passed on through time to other generations. But now so many other things are seen as culturally significant, that cultural studies can take almost anything as a subject, very large or very small, which expresses the ideas and beliefs of its time. But clearly there still remains a difference of weight and scale between, for example a history of shoes or  bicycles, and a history of architecture or Christianity. It is still vitally important that cultural history should try to identify and evaluate the principal forces that shape our lives, and to understand what they are expressing. In a sense, cultural studies are like collective psycho-analysis, revealing unknown aspects of ourselves. The cultural studies on this website include: the vast subject of Western Art over three thousand years; studies in the life of the mind, as individual artists and thinkers in the modern world have evolved their own belief systems; travel through the ages, looking at the various motives for foreign travel and exploration, and at their consequences; the extraordinary variety of churches to be found in one Italian city; and the habit of letter-writing, once essential in all civilised communities, but now entirely extinct and replaced by terse electronic messages.