History Workshop and its Legacies

I first encountered History Workshop through the pages of the journal, in 1976–77, and then I met it embodied in members of its collective, at the Oral History conference at Essex in March 1979. It was an emotional conference, the first one in which many of us oral historians from various countries confronted our experiences. A crucial legacy of HW is the continuation of the convergence we discovered then in conceiving the role of history as ‘bringing the boundaries of history closer to people’s lives’, by paying attention to the daily aspects of social life, such as various forms of subjectivity (imagination included), material culture, gender differences and so on. This went together with the effort to cross the divide separating theory and empirical practice in history – which meant also to find links between history and other disciplines – as well as to present the steps taken in historical enquiry, not only its results. This legacy has been transformed through the years (actually the decades) between then and now. The subjects of history have become much more numerous, being now not only the ones we started with, such as workers and women, but people of all cultures and ages. (The journal’s subtitle used to give some indication of this: A Journal of Socialist Historians from 1976–1982 (issues 1–12), then from issue 13 till issue 38 A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians. With a dramatic redesign of the cover from issue 39 (spring 1995) the subtitle was dropped altogether because there was too much to include.)

Cultural history · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Oral history · Social history (medicine) · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Subtitle · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies