Volume 24, Number 7 · April 28, 1977
News from the Workshop
By Neal Ascherson
History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist Historians
Issues One and Two
P.O. Box 69, Oxford, England, $7.50 single issue
It has been cruelly said that the English have a sense of themselves as a nation, but not as a people. The French or Spanish democrat can point to cataclysms and caesurae in history which have allowed 'the people' to define itself and to establish its own tradition and mythology distinct from those of the ruling groups. England has had no such experiences since the well-expunged seventeenth-century revolution, and is still supposed to have a single 'history.' Whatever their differences over priorities and interpretations, the liberal historians who have dominated British history have never allowed that the working class might be entitled to see the past as a story with quite different leaders and struggles and tragedies. This has disturbed younger and more radical historians for most of the postwar period, and they have begun—like intellectual nationalists cooking up a culture for a suppressed linguistic group—to compose that missing tradition on their own.
Review, 724 words
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