Apeople's history is a type ofhistorical narrative devised in the United States of America which attempts to account for historical events from the perspective ofcommon people rather than leaders. There is an emphasis ondisenfranchised, theoppressed, the poor, the nonconformists, and otherwise marginal groups. Arising in America in response to the development ofsocial history in Europe, authors typically have aMarxist model in mind.[1]
Social history, "History from below" and "people's history"
Georges Lefebvre first used the phrase"histoire vue d'en bas et non d'en haut" (history seen from below and not from above) in 1932 when praisingAlbert Mathiez for seeking to tell the"histoire des masses et non de vedettes" (history of the masses and not of starlets).[2] People's history was first used in the title ofA. L. Morton's 1938 book,A People's History of England.[3] Yet it wasE. P. Thompson's essayHistory from Below inThe Times Literary Supplement (1966) which brought the phrase to the forefront of historiography from the 1970s.[4]: 113 [5][6] Notably, history From Below appeared as the title of the Thompson article, put there by an anonymous editor.[7] The concept was popularized among non-historians in the United States byHoward Zinn's 1980 book,A People's History of the United States.[8] Zinn's people's history marked the popular rise of the application of social history in scholarship about the United States.
A people's history is the history as the story of mass movements and of the outsiders. Individuals not included in the past in other type of writing about history are part of history-from-below theory's primary focus, which includes thedisenfranchised, theoppressed, thepoor, the nonconformists, thesubaltern and the otherwise forgotten people. This theory also usually focuses on events occurring in the fullness of time, or when an overwhelming wave of smaller events cause certain developments to occur. This approach to writing history is in direct opposition to methods which tend to emphasize single great figures in history, referred to as theGreat Man theory; it argues that the driving factor of history is the daily life of ordinary people, theirsocial status andprofession. These are the factors that "push and pull" on opinions and allow for trends to develop, as opposed to great people introducing ideas or initiating events.
In his bookA People's History of the United States,Howard Zinn wrote: "The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, asAlbert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners."[9]
HistorianGuy Beiner wrote that "the Neo-Marxist flag-bearers of history from below have at times resorted to idealized and insufficiently sophisticated notions of 'the people', unduly ascribing to them innate progressive values. In practice, democratic history is by no means egalitarian".[10]
^When the State Trembled 1442660228 Reinhold Kramer, Tom Mitchell - 2010 "It was Lucien Febvre who first used the phrase 'history from below' when in 1932 he observed that Albert Mathiez, a founding member of the Annales tradition, had sought 'histoire des masses et non de vedettes; histoire vue d'en bas en non ..."
^AL Morton Compendium of Communist Biographies, Graham Stevenson, Accessed Feb 2014
^Black, Jeremy; MacRaild, Donald M. (1 January 2016) [2007].Studying History. Macmillan Education UK.ISBN978-1-137-47860-3.
^Black and MacRaild wrote that Thompson's 1966 essay, 'History from below', in theTimes Literary Supplement "was the real starting point, not only of the term, but of attempts to define it, to intellectualise about it, and to give it a coherent agenda...."
^ Tom Mitchell, "History From Below," Times Literary Supplement, November 24, 2006, 15
A People's History of Poverty in America byStephen Pimpare (New York: New Press ; London : Turnaround, 2008)
A People's History of Environmentalism in the United States byChad Montrie (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011)
For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America byJohn Curl (PM Press, 2012)
Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice byJessica Gordon Nembhard (Penn State university press, 2014)
A People's History of Sports in the United States byDave Zirin (New York; London: New Press, c. 2008)
A People's Art History of the United States byNicolas Lampert (New press, 2010)
Downwind: A People's History of the Nuclear West bySarah Alisabeth Fox (Bison Books, 2014)
