History for the Working Classes

This book examines how working-class people studied, wrote, and engaged with social and economic history from the late nineteenth century through to the 1980s. This widespread and profound engagement with history was foundational to working-class conceptions of politics and society, and that the political culture of British left-wing politics and the trade union movement cannot be properly understood without addressing how significantly it drew upon history.

From the origins of the modern labour movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, history provided working-class political culture with a progressive rather than revolutionary historical narrative, in which the working classes grew in power over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, in the twentieth, assumed a powerful position in British politics and society. The book covers in detail over forty different groups and organizations that taught history for a wide variety of purposes across all parts of Britain and Ireland, arguing that the plurality of approaches and attention to historical accuracy were the greatest strengths of teaching.

History for the Working Classes: Politics, Education and the Uses of the Industrial Past in Britain, 1884-1985 reconstructs the similarities and approaches of these groups to teaching, as well as what drew their members to history, drawing on hundreds of personal accounts and archives to demonstrate how working class people understood history. This book will be beneficial to both academic and postgraduate audiences.