A subdivision of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), from 1946-1956 the Communist Party Historians Group formed a highly influential cluster of British Marxist historians, who contributed to "history from below." Famous members included such leading lights of 20th-century British history as Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel and E.P. Thompson, as well as important non-academics like A. L. Morton and Brian Pearce.
In keeping with their standing positions, many of the members carried out their projects from adult education institutions, rather than the academy. In 1952 several of the members founded the influential social history journal Past and Present.
Read more about Communist Party Historians Group: Aims and Methods, 1956 and After, Socialist History Society, Notable Members
Famous quotes containing the words communist, party, historians and/or group:
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.”
—Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)
“The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.”
—Alfred Jarry (1873–1907)