For admirers of a venerable progressive tradition in academia, it is proving an uplifting start to the year. The idea of “history from below”, foregrounding the experience of groups grievously neglected by traditional studies, was most famously pioneered by the Marxist historian EP Thompson. In his The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson rescued industrial textile workers from what he described as the “enormous condescension of posterity”. In this, the month of his centenary, other neglected voices have come to the fore.
In a fascinating new book entitled Remembering Peasants, the historian Patrick Joyce has performed a recuperative service on behalf of an often disdained culture – one that now has all but vanished in Europe. Prof Joyce has set out to rectify the record for the lost peasant generations who, historically, “do not generally speak, they are spoken to”. And in a very different way, a list of 56 new working-class heritage projects released on Wednesday by Historic England will facilitate the telling of some remarkable and little-known stories.
