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political climate of the sixties and the seventies has left us with rela–
tively few who do not conform to this type - the rationality of tradi–
tional political or intellectual history is a kind of false consciousness,
and the nonrational presuppositions of anthropological or psycho–
analytical history are more likely to be true. Like Thompson , the
practitioners of the new social history are often opponents not merely
of capitalism but of industrialism, and look back nostalgically on the
imagined social harmonies of a preindustrial communal life.
There are different forms taken by the Marxist social history of
the 1960s onward, but all acknowledge a debt to Thompson, and al–
most all see the semi-annual
History Workshop
as their special organ .
This journal (whose first issue appeared in 1975) was founded at
Ruskin College, a workingman's school at Oxford, and its guiding
spirit has been Raphael Samuel, a tutor at the college . Ruskin's
"history workshops" began in 1967, a time of student upheaval, as a
protest against the university's examination system . Instead of tradi–
tional academic seminars, students were encouraged to infuse their
historical research with their life and work experience : a workshop
pamphlet on Durham coal miners, for example, was both autobio–
graphical and historical, and explained miners' militancy in the most
personal terms. Popular resistance was a leading theme of other
pamphlets as well, and one on the 1911 strikes of school children saw
the strikers confronted by their strike-breaking mothers . The work–
shops stressed local and workplace studies, seeing them as partic–
ularly useful in inspiring class consciousness as well as archival
research into the activities of unknown workers and revolutionaries
of the past. The sessions were marked by informality and folk–
singing, and encouraged first-time nonacademic historians in an ef–
fort to realize what Samuel described as the "democratisation of his–
torical practice ."
While the pamphlet series draws mostly on the contributions of
trade unionists, academic historians are well-represented in the
pages of the
History Workshop
journal, which has on the whole followed
the Thompsonian lines in the search for moments of revolutionary
epiphany, and romantic merging of the historian and his subject.
The vocation of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "resurrection
man" who reclaimed recently buried bodies in order to sell the ca–
davers to medical schools has been mimicked in the social historian's
archival exhumation of previously unknown heroes of the pro–
letarian resistance for political as well as "scientific" purposes . Scraps
of working-class autobiography or cOQtemporary labor ballads are
