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  • History Workshop and its Legacies
  • Luisa Passerini (bio)

I first encountered History Workshop through the pages of the journal, in 1976–77, and then I met it embodied in members of its collective, at the Oral History conference at Essex in March 1979. It was an emotional conference, the first one in which many of us oral historians from various countries confronted our experiences. A crucial legacy of HW is the continuation of the convergence we discovered then in conceiving the role of history as 'bringing the boundaries of history closer to people's lives', by paying attention to the daily aspects of social life, such as various forms of subjectivity (imagination included), material culture, gender differences and so on. This went together with the effort to cross the divide separating theory and empirical practice in history – which meant also to find links between history and other disciplines – as well as to present the steps taken in historical enquiry, not only its results. This legacy has been transformed through the years (actually the decades) between then and now. The subjects of history have become much more numerous, being now not only the ones we started with, such as workers and women, but people of all cultures and ages. (The journal's subtitle used to give some indication of this: A Journal of Socialist Historians from 1976–1982 (issues 1–12), then from issue 13 till issue 38 A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians. With a dramatic redesign of the cover from issue 39 (spring 1995) the subtitle was dropped altogether because there was too much to include.)

Today, they are diasporic subjects of all kinds. My present research is still inspired by that old idea, but its subjects are migrants to and through Europe from all over the world. The focus is no longer on oral memory, it is now on the visual memory of the movement of bodies in global perspective. The use of visual sources is today, I believe, a frontier of historical studies comparable to what oral sources represented in the 1970s and 1980s. The new conceptual triangle that our time requires us to put in historical perspective is memory/mobility/visuality.

The accent on visuality too is a legacy of History Workshop Journal, although in a hidden form. I remember the relevance of images, on the covers (the miner's blackened hands holding a cigarette, on HWJ 2, has stayed with me) and within the pages of the journal, and of course I have in mind the attention given to the cinema. But I think especially of an article by Raphael Samuel on the importance of the visual, in 1978 (HWJ 6), [End Page 223] introducing a series of writings on art, politics and ideology. Among them, an essay by Eric Hobsbawm on 'man and woman' (inverted commas because I no longer use the singular) in socialist iconography, and the lively debate it generated, with polemical interventions by Tim Mason, Sally Alexander, Anna Davin, Eve Hostettler, and Maurice Agulhon (HWJ 7 and 8, 1979).

There is one more legacy of relevance. History Workshop has always had an instructive (for me) attitude to the relationships between colleagues: a 'democratic scholarship', consisting in a combination of friendship, intersubjective engagement in common search, honest criticism and yet admiration for each other's work (the last being largely unknown in the Italian universities I had attended). The same mixture of admiration and criticism can be found in HWJ towards 'our respected elders' and 'lost comrades', as Raphael Samuel wrote. There are many instances of giving voice to this attitude besides the case of Hobsbawm, such as publishing Richard Johnson's critique of the work of Edward Thompson (HWJ 6, 1978), and a reflection on The Making of the English Working Class after fifty years by Selina Todd (HWJ 76, 2013), which gives a deep sense of a critical tradition.

Respect, which I find a major legacy within this critical tradition, is quite evident in the obituaries that constellate HWJ with a rich and variegated memory. I was moved, going back to re-read some of the issues, to find friendly and honest words on so many people I had...

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