'A different kind of history is possible' : the history workshop movement and the politics of British and West German historical practice

• Main Author: Gwinn, I. A.
• Other Authors: Rosenhaft, E. ; Marsh, C.
• Published: University of Liverpool 2016
• Subjects: 327.41043
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.706792

This research examines the meaning and practice of History Workshop as a site of knowledge production and emancipatory politics in Britain and West Germany from the late-1960s to the early-1980s. In this respect, it marks a departure from most secondary accounts that have been written on the movement and associated forms of historical work in both countries, which have tended to separate out intellectual history from the social and cultural histories of protest and activism. The aim of this research is to preserve the interdependence and mutual implication of these two realms, treating them as part of the many-sided political dynamic that energised and directed the activities of the movement. Furthermore, it goes beyond the existing literature by broadening the scope of inquiry to encompass transnational spheres of activity, which includes an investigation of the forms of interaction, exchange and mutual perception between Workshop historians in both countries, along with a focus on the social networks and institutional apparatuses, and the ways in which they connected participants. This approach follows trends in recent scholarship on the history of social movements, where historians have increasingly turned their attention towards the comparative, transnational and global contexts of protest, a trend that is also slowly filtering into other fields like intellectual history and even the subspecialism of the history of historiography.