Whose Story? An Argument from within Current Historical Practice in Britain

Bibliographic Data

ID10074748
AuthorsStephen Yeo (corresponding author)
Year1986
Volume21
Issue2
Pages295-320
Publication date1986-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/002200948602100208
OpenAlexW1972262447
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited6

Whose Story? This is an awkward question being raised throughout contemporary historical practice in Britain. Women have raised it most successfully in recent years, producing as much of their story as they have been able. 1 Theirs is the most flourishing branch of the contemporary publishing industry, historical or otherwise. The work of the History Workshop Movement and its journal (the first Workshop at Ruskin College, Oxford was set up in 1966, and the first Journal published in 1976), and of groups affiliated to the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (which came together in 1976) and of oral historians (the first issue of Oral History was published in 1970) has greatly extended the range of forms available for 'people's history'.2 There are now groups throughout Britain who work from the point of view of subordinate, relatively voiceless people. Such groups are interested in change as well as in understanding. They want a better world, and find private and public historical themes to be enjoyable enablers of association. They are not groups of Historians with a capital H; they are writers' workshops, feminist groupings, trades council subcommittees, community publishers, local state employees, resource centres and suchlike who find history, especially their own, a key component of liberation. Their characteristic forms of publication are books, no more than a hundred pages long, printed by web-offset litho with many pictures. They sell in large quantities, intensively rather than extensively. 'Working-class history', wrote Neil Ascherson in a review of the first two issues of History Workshop, 'is not just the history of the working class, but history as perceived by the working class, a very much more ambitious undertaking.'3 The life story of Arthur Exell, a Morris Motors car worker, in History Workshop, is not at all the same as Mark Starr's A Worker Looks at History (1918).4 Both are by

Argument (complex analysis · Flourishing · Media studies · Oral history · Political science · Publishing · Sociology · State (computer science · Classics · Cultural History and Identity Formation · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Psychology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub