As a graduate student in the 1970s, looking around for new approaches to history that would enable me to do something different from my teachers' generation, I spent a lot of time with my fellow students discussing the relative attractions of British Marxist historians like Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson, German neo-Weberians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, American students of social inequality like Stephan Thernstrom, advocates of a social-anthropological approach such as Keith Thomas, partisans of a politically committed history of everyday life like Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop, and more besides. The world of history seemed then to be not just expanding but exploding, into areas undreamed of by the political and diplomatic historians on whose work we had been brought up.

LRB 3 December 2009 | PDF Download