- You have seen this painting before. In 5.1 it was Braudel’s event: the loudest afternoon of the century, and on his reading a surface. Braudel explained why the battle changed nothing. Does that explain the men in it?
- Count the oars; then look for the rowers. Every hull has its banks out, and not one man pulling them is drawn. Slaves, convicts and the very poor. Who has to be invisible for a battle to look like this?
- Nothing here was thought to be missing. For centuries this was simply what a history of Lepanto looked like: the powers, the commanders, the count of ships and the dead. What would have to change before the rowers became a subject?
St Peter’s Field · 16 August 1819
Sixty thousand people were in that field. The print names one.
- What did the other 59,999 thousand think they were doing that morning?
- If nobody wrote it down, is that a question history is allowed to ask?
- Count the faces. The engraver drew them one at a time — hats, coats, a woman in white, arms flung out. Sixty thousand came for parliamentary reform; the yeomanry rode in and eighteen died. What would you need to write a history of this field?
- The one name on it is a gentleman. Henry Hunt — wealthy farmer, the day’s main speaker, jailed for it — is who those sixty thousand came to hear. Thompson says the movement still looked to a gentlemanly leader (pp. 622–23). Why did the crowd need him?
- Then read who is not named. “The Female Reformers of Manchester” are thanked as a group — a category, where Hunt got a name and a dedication. Who has to be named before a historian counts them as an actor?
- Read who signed it. Carlile was on the hustings, escaped, and published this in October as their “Fellow Labourer.” The fullest record of the day was made by a participant with a case to make. Is a source made to accuse worse than one made to administer?
Making History • HIST 1105 • Week 6.1
History From Below
- Background: Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (2017), ch. 1: “The History of Whom?”, 10–44
- E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Preface and ch. 1, 1–25
- Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (1985), ch. 1, 1–13 and 27–31
Page numbers name the author, because all three books are cited by page and their numbering overlaps. Thompson is the Vintage printing, Vansina the Wisconsin edition.
Today in context
What makes history happen?
Week 4 · Ranke, 1824
What the documents say, reported without invention.
Week 5 · Marx and Braudel
Structures. Class conflict over production; sea, soil and climate underneath everything.
Week 6.1 · Thompson, 1963
People — making themselves, out of what they experience and what they do about it.
Week 6.2 · Scott, 1986
Gender, as the system that makes any of those arrangements look natural.
Part one · history from above
For most of history’s history, the actors were the people who decided things
The answer that looked obvious
Rulers, commanders and leaders mattered because their decisions shaped the lives of thousands. Write the ruler and you have written the age (Maza, p. 10).
And it is not simply wrong
Henry VIII’s decision to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn broke the English church from Rome. One man’s choice, generations of consequence (Maza, p. 11).
What the answer settles quietly
Asking “whose history?” is asking which sphere of human activity counts. For centuries the answer was politics, and politics meant public power (Maza, p. 12).
(Google Art Project, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)
Part one · the case for the old answer
Take the strongest version of it before taking it apart
Political history should matter above all else, because the state is where humans pursue their highest form of rationality, “reflected in the rational ordering and organization of society by means of laws, constitutions, and political institutions.”
Why the citation is three names deep
Himmelfarb reaches for Aristotle because it makes political history sound like philosophy, not habit: Politics I.2 argues the polis is humanity’s highest form of association, the place where the good life, not mere life, becomes possible. Maza reaches for Himmelfarb because she is the sharpest living voice still making the case — in The New History and the Old (1987), written specifically against the social history that had already displaced it.
The older precedent
Aristotle supplies the theory; the practice is centuries older. Thucydides had already written history as the doings of states and generals, and said so: his subject is a war between powers, recorded so that readers who want to understand human affairs, facing something like it again, might see it clearly (1.22–23). Twenty-three centuries later, that is still the history Thompson is arguing against.
Three assumptions underneath
- The state is the most important arena of human activity.
- Political leaders drive historical change.
- “Politics” is something that happens in public (Maza, p. 13).
Part one · before the 1960s
Social history was already a century old.
“When they were effective as a crowd … historians celebrated them for advancing the purpose of their forward-looking superiors, while never acknowledging them individually by name.”
The lineage
France from the 1820s: Thiers and Michelet made “the people” the movers of 1789. England: Macaulay (1848), then his great-nephew Trevelyan (Maza, p. 14).
The catch
That tradition was “clearly subordinate and accessory to political history”: the social chapter is scenery, and the action on stage is still the politics (Maza, pp. 14–15).
The same idea as the opening slide. Hunt is named, the Female Reformers are thanked as a group, and sixty thousand people are a crowd, not individual people with lives.
Part one · Trevelyan, 1942
The phrase that made the tradition famous names what it left out
Social history is “the history of a people with the politics left out.”
What that book is
Six hundred pages of English life to 1901 — trade routes, population, marriage customs, diets, how damp a peasant home felt in 1750. Written in 1942 to lift wartime morale (Maza, pp. 14–15).
Disputed or not, it names the assumption. Leave the politics out and the poor stop being able to change anything — pictures rather than an argument (Maza, p. 15).
Part one · the 1960s and 1970s
Then the discipline changed its mind, fast
How fast
In 1948 almost no American dissertations were in social history; by 1978, a quarter. Across Harvard, Yale, Michigan and Wisconsin, courses ran from nought to two a year in the late 1950s, and thirteen to seventeen twenty years later (Maza, p. 17).
Nobody agreed what it was
In the United States “history from below” and “bottom-up” fell out of favor for sounding judgmental or mildly salacious. “Social history” stuck as the name; what it meant in practice never settled (Maza, p. 17).
Part one · quantification
The first answer was to count everybody
The reasoning
If numbers don’t lie and bigger samples are safer, the solid truths are in large numbers. Social history becomes a social science (Maza, p. 17).
Where the numbers are
Authorities kept what they needed: prices, yields, births, marriages, deaths, censuses for taxation. Quantification works best on population, the economy and mass politics (Maza, pp. 17–18).
The archive of the poor is mostly a record of them being counted, taxed, and buried. That shapes which questions are answerable.
Part one · discussion
Counting the poor
A parish register gives you every burial in a village for two centuries. What can you now ask, and what can you still not ask?
Counting proves the poor were there; it cannot say what they wanted, because nobody recording them was asking. A source made to administer answers administrative questions.
Part two · 1963
One book reset what the word “class” was allowed to mean
Quantification had made the poor visible in aggregate. The book that mattered most contained not a single numerical table.
The object
The Making of the English Working Class, 1963: eight hundred pages on English working people between roughly 1780 and 1830. Its author has been called the most widely cited historian of the twentieth century (Maza, pp. 23–25).
Part two · the preface
The working class was a participant, not a product
“Making, because it is a study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.”
What “agency” is doing here
Conditions press on people; people also act. Marx gave the conditions a motor. Thompson insists the people inside it were doing something of their own. Compare 5.1.
Part two · the definition
Class is not a thing you can find. It is something that happens.
“I do not see class as a ‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category’, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.”
The consequence for method
“The finest-meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love” (p. 9). You cannot sample for it.
“Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition” (p. 11).
Part two · what he is writing against
He names the three histories he is arguing with
01
Fabian
Named for the Fabian Society, the British socialists who wanted reform by degrees rather than revolution. Their working people are passive victims of laissez faire, saved by a few far-sighted organizers.
02
Empirical economic
The measurers: wages, prices, output, migration. Working people appear “as a labour force, as migrants, or as the data for statistical series.”
03
“Pilgrim’s Progress”
Thompson’s jibe, borrowed from a 1678 allegory in which a pilgrim walks to salvation. History written the same way: the past as a road to the Welfare State, everyone graded by how far along it they got.
The quarrel
“Each of these orthodoxies has a certain validity. All have added to our knowledge.” His objection to the first two: “they tend to obscure the agency of working people” (p. 12).
Part two · the famous sentence
The people he wants back are the ones who were wrong
“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.”
Read the adjectives
Obsolete, utopian, deluded — in quotation marks, because they are posterity’s words, not his. Every one is a reason an earlier historian gave for leaving somebody out.
(Working Class Movement Library, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)
Note the books at her elbow.
(Published by John Bell, 2 October 1814. Public domain.)
Part two · the standard of judgment
Being wrong about the future is not a reason to be left out of the past
“Only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten.”
His answer
“Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience” — and the test he offers is that “they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not” (p. 13).
Judging the past by what happened next is a method, not neutrality. It writes off everyone who guessed wrong.
Part two · discussion
A belief as evidence
Thousands of people believed a sixty-four-year-old woman was about to give birth to a messiah. What would you have to think that belief was to make it a historical fact rather than a curiosity?
Her followers were mostly poor, in a decade of war, hunger and machine-breaking; the prophecy reads that decade. Calling a belief deluded ends the enquiry. Asking what made it credible starts one.
Part three · the problem Thompson leaves
Thompson could do this because England wrote everything down
Thompson closes the argument of his preface looking outward: “Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won” (p. 13).
A promise his method can’t keep
His method runs on paper — spy reports, trials, petitions, hymns, chapbooks — read against the grain. Where the archive is thin or was never written, reading against the grain has nothing to read.
(Unknown photographer. Public domain.)
- The record here is a person. Nobody is named, but the ngoni marks its holder’s trade: he is kept to hold and perform his community’s past. If the record is a person, what happens to it when he dies?
- The women get nothing at all. His instrument gives him a trade; they get neither a name nor a role. In Mande griot families the instruments are men’s work and the singing is largely the women’s. If the voice is the record, who here is unrecorded?
- And it is a postcard, not a record of either. A studio pose against a painted backdrop, captioned “Groupe Soussous” — a type, not three people — made for sale in France. What does a source record when its maker had no reason to learn a name?
Part three · the definition
One hard line, but that’s it
Oral traditions are “verbal messages which are reported statements from the past beyond the present generation.”
The line he does draw
Spoken, sung or called out on instruments, so not writing. Beyond the present generation, so not an interview about someone’s own life — that is oral history, a different source (pp. 27–28).
The ones he refuses
Others would require a tradition to be widely known, or told with the conscious intent to testify. “Far too restrictive”: much is learned from sources not concerned with the past, which “testify despite themselves” (p. 28).
Part three · the move
He does not ask you to trust it, but to treat it as a document
“A tradition should be seen as a series of successive historical documents all lost except for the last one and usually interpreted by every link in the chain of transmission.”
What this reframing does
It puts tradition inside source criticism instead of outside it: every link can be questioned, and the last teller is not the author. He warns in the same breath against pushing it — oral messages are not originals and copies (p. 30).
“Evidence potentially far from an event, but it is still evidence unless it be shown that a message does not finally rest on a first statement made by an observer” (p. 29).
Part three · two things he adds
The method is old, and the chain is a simplification
Somebody got there first
Islamic scholars have judged hadith by examining the links in the chain of transmission since the second century after the Hijra — assessing each witness between the Prophet’s Companion and the recorder (p. 30).
And the neat chain is wrong
Most tradition is “told by many people to many people.” There are no tidy lines; transmission is communal and continuous (p. 30).
That messiness is not only loss: “Multiple flow does not necessarily imply multiple distortion only, rather perhaps the reverse” (p. 31).
Part three · discussion
What counts as a source
Ranke wanted claims that rest on named sources anyone could go and check. Vansina wants a link between record and observation, and every link in the chain criticized. Same demand, or a different one?
Kept: evidence must rest on somebody’s observation, every link criticized. Refused: that only writing can carry it. Paper was a fact of European archives, not a rule of evidence.
Thompson and Vansina
Both widen who counts. Only one of them has to build a new kind of source.
Thompson, 1963
The archive exists and is hostile. Read it against the grain and the people it was written to control come through it.
Vansina, 1985
For much of the world the archive was never written. Establish how a spoken tradition is a document, and work out the rules for critiquing it.
New topics needed new reading. New parts of the world needed new sources.
The lecture · three parts
Who counts, whether they acted, and what counts as evidence
01 · Maza, ch. 1
Who counts
Ordinary people were in the books for a century, as scenery. The 1960s made them actors; counting them answered only the questions their administrators had asked.
02 · Thompson, 1963
Agency
Class is something people do, not a category you sample for. The losers belong in the history, and hindsight is not a neutral standard.
03 · Vansina, 1985
Evidence
Oral tradition is an uncertain but valid source. Keep Ranke’s requirement of a link to an observation; drop the assumption that it has to be written.
The take home
Changing who history is about forces a change in what counts as a source
Why it could not stop at topics
Archives were built by institutions with no reason to record workers, women or colonized communities. Deciding to write about them is not enough if the evidence rules stay as they were.
Every rule about what counts as evidence is also a decision about whose past can be known. Those rules were written by people who were not thinking about you.