Making Histories: Studies in history-writing and politics

First published in 2006. History and politics are fundamentally connected – indeed historians themselves have often made links between the two explicit. Making Histories explores the relationship between history and politics as it has developed in histories which are critical of the dominant, academic traditions of history writing, and makes a substantial contribution to the debate about the most appropriate way to handle the relations between theory and history. Part One is concerned with the development of ‘people’s history’ – a social history with popular sympathies and links with radical politics. Three phases are discussed: the work of the Hammonds, the Communist Party Historians’ Group of the 1950s, and the historical-political projects of E. P. Thompson. Part Two focuses on the relation between history and theory within Marxism generally and argues that philosophical and methodological assumptions play a key role in more narrowly empirical and historical debates. Part Three presents discussions of three newer forms of political history writing which take a more ‘popular’ turn: oral history, the public construction of the national past in the form of National Heritage or community, and a feminist assessment of histories of the suffragette movement. In challenging received opinion about the scope of ‘history’, the authors stress that historiography is concerned not with the past, but with the relation between the past and the present and argue that popular conceptions of history have an importance usually denied or ignored by academic historians.