Search results for ""author e. p. thompson""

Fifty years since first publication, E. P. Thompson's revolutionary account of working-class culture and ideals is published in Penguin Modern Classics, with a new introduction by historian Michael KennyThis classic and imaginative account of working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, revolutionized our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and re-creates the whole-life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation, and who yet created a cultured and political consciousness of great vitality.Reviews:'A dazzling vindication of the lives and aspirations of the then - and now once again - neglected culture of working-class England' Martin Kettle, Observer'Superbly readable . . . a moving account of the culture of the self-taught in an age of social and intellectual deprivation' Asa Briggs, Financial Times'Thompson's work combines passion and intellect, the gifts of the poet, the narrator and the analyst' E. J. Hobsbawm, Independent'An event not merely in the writing of English history but in the politics of our century' Michael Foot, Times Literary Supplement'The greatest of our socialist historians' Terry Eagleton, New StatesmanAbout the author:E. P. Thompson was born in 1924 and read history at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, graduating in 1946. An academic, writer and acclaimed historian, his first major work was a biography of William Morris. The Making of the English Working Class was instantly recognized as a classic on its publication in 1963 and secured his position as one of the leading social historians of his time. Thompson was also an active campaigner and key figure in the ending of the Cold War. He died in 1993, survived by his wife and two sons.

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An account of the 1944 Special Operations mission into Serbia to make contact with a group of Bulgarian partisans operating in the area which resulted in the execution by firing squad of Frank Thompson and the remaining leaders of the partisans and villagers who had aided them.

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William Morris-the great 19th century craftsman, architect, designer, poet and writer-remains a monumental figure whose influence resonates powerfully today. As an intellectual (and author of the seminal utopian News From Nowhere), his concern with artistic and human values led him to cross what he called the 'river of fire' and become a committed socialist-committed not to some theoretical formula but to the day by day struggle of working women and men in Britain and to the evolution of his ideas about art, about work and about how life should be lived. Many of his ideas accorded none too well with the reforming tendencies dominant in the Labour movement, nor with those of 'orthodox' Marxism, which has looked elsewhere for inspiration. Both sides have been inclined to venerate Morris rather than to pay attention to what he said. Originally written less than a decade before his groundbreaking The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson brought to this biography his now trademark historical mastery, passion, wit, and essential sympathy. It remains unsurpassed as the definitive work on this remarkable figure, by the major British historian of the 20th century.

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This is the first collection of essays on Chartism by leading social historian Dorothy Thompson, whose work radically transformed the way in which Chartism is understood. Reclaiming Chartism as a fully-blown working-class movement, Thompson intertwines her penetrating analyses of class with ground-breaking research uncovering the role played by women in the movement.Throughout her essays, Thompson strikes a delicate balance between down-to-the-ground accounts of local uprisings, snappy portraits of high-profile Chartist figures as well as rank-and-file men and women, and more theoretical, polemical interventions.Of particular historical and political significance is the previously unpublished substantial essay co-authored by Dorothy and Edward Thompson, a superb piece of local historical research by two social historians then on the brink of notable careers.

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