What became of cultural historicism in the French reclamation of Strasbourg after World War One?

There is an inherent obstacle to understanding how surges of great momentum have occurred in the history of historiographic epistemology: Enterprising scholars at the helm of such movements typically announce their approach as the arrival of a "new history."1 "New" was the designation that the German cultural historian Karl Lamprecht gave to his work in the eighteen-eighties,2 just as Peter Burke, Lynn Hunt, Joan Scott and others proclaimed the advent of the "new cultural history" some hundred odd years later.3 When we consider how the work of such historians indeed coincided with radical changes in historiographic practice for a particular generation, it is tempting to accept that the novelty of their own self-construction explains the generative momentum of their work. But there are good reasons to look sceptically at such claims, or else we risk reducing the history of historiography to a simplistic story of inventions and ruptures in the steady teleological march toward a better way of knowing the past.