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A book that revolutionised our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the English working class emerged through the degradations of the industrial revolution to create a culture and political consciousness of enormous vitality.
Edward Thompson, perhaps the greatest post-war historian in the English-speaking world, died in 1993. In this readable and unabashedly appreciative survey of Thompson’s histories and politics, Byran D. Palmer reviews include a passionate biographical account of the late-nineteenth-century Romantic William Morris, the hugely acclaimed The Making of the English Working Class, and a series of eighteenth-century studies that reach from customary culture to the antinomian poetics of William Blake. In reviewing the politics which gave shape to his historical work, Palmer assesses the role of Thompson’s family background in India, his youth in the Communist Party, his decisive break with Stalin...
E. P. Thompson is a towering fi gure in the fi eld of labor history, best known for his monumental and path-breaking work, The Making of the English Working Class. But as this collection shows, Thompson was much more than a historian: he was a dedicated educator of workers, a brilliant polemicist, a skilled political theorist, and a tireless agitator for peace, against nuclear weapons, and for a rebirth of the socialist project. The essays in this book, many of which are either out-of-print or diffi cult to obtain, were written between 1955 and 1963 during one of the most fertile periods of Thompson’s intellectual and political life, when he wrote his two great works, The Making of the Eng...
Thompson began his political life, as a member of the Communist Party, when the Party was making its greatest electoral impact. After the events in Hungary in 1956 he came into conflict with others in the New Left over issues of theory, orthodoxy and politics. He was at the forefront of the movement opposing nuclear weapons in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, becoming an extremely well known political figure.
For better or worse, E.P. Thompson’s monumental book The Making of the English Working Class has played an essential role in shaping the intellectual lives of generations of readers since its original publication in 1963. This collected volume explores the complex impact of Thompson’s book, both as an intellectual project and material object, relating it to the social and cultural history of the book form itself—an enduring artifact of English history.
The “meticulously researched, elegantly argued and deeply humane” sequel to the landmark volume of social history, The Making of the English Working Class (The New York Times Book Review). This remarkable study investigates the gradual disappearance of a range of cultural customs against the backdrop of the great upheavals of the eighteenth century. As villagers were subjected to a legal system increasingly hostile to custom, they tried both to resist and to preserve tradition, becoming, as E. P. Thompson explains, “rebellious, but rebellious in defense of custom.” Although some historians have written of riotous peasants of England and Wales as if they were mainly a problem for magi...
The work of E. P. Thompson as historian, socialist and peace activist has been enormously influential. Yet attempts to assess the impact of his work as a whole - perhaps because of the very diversity of his contributions - have been rare. This book attempts such an evaluation, bringing together a range of authors who, in original essays, assess the main dimensions of Thompson's work. Contributors include, Harvey Kaye, Keith McClelland, Renato Rosaldo, Kate Soper, Robbie Gray, Martin Shaw, Catherine Hall, Geoff Eley, and John Goode. The book is written from a critical but sympathetic standpoint. It makes a very substantial contribution to the scholarly and practical appraisal of Thompson's ideas.
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Few historians in this century have had as lasting and marked an impact as E. P. Thompson. His rewriting of English history, beginning with The Making of the English Working Class, has affected a whole generation of historians. At the same time, his role as a political activist was second only to Bertrand Russells, whose mantle he ......
First paperback edition of one of E. P. Thompson's best and most deeply felt works.