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  • History Workshop Journal:Widening the Circle
  • Felix Driver and Bill Schwarz

Type 'workshop' into any one of today's online dictionaries, and you'll find it combines two meanings: one refers to a space where manual or light industrial work is done, the other to the idea of a small-scale creative or educational event, usually involving the informal exchange of ideas between a small number of participants. As an expression of the aspirations of the founders of this journal in 1975, the word could hardly have been bettered; in that optimistic moment, the workshop idea seemed to fuse the virtues of honest toil, creative skill and mutual support, combining the ethics of artisanal production with the consciousness-raising politics of liberation. The editorial published in the first issue of History Workshop Journal (spring 1976) insisted that it would be a workshop in character as well as name: it would aim to reveal the workings of historical inquiry as much as the results, to encourage a collaborative approach to the conduct of research, to highlight the provisional nature of all historical writing, to encourage a healthy spirit of dialogue amongst readers, and above all to make the journal 'a point of contact, a place where experiences are shared, projects encouraged, theoretical issues broached'.

Needless to say, times have changed. But the commitment to widening the circle of historical production – of breaking down the barriers between historians, and of encouraging greater communication between different fields of historical practice – remains an important goal for HWJ today. For that reason we are delighted to announce a number of initiatives which we hope will renew this commitment to the pursuit of history as a shared project. The first is the establishment of a new HWJ Conference and Workshop Fund, devoted to the encouragement of all aspects of historical research and its dissemination. This fund will provide small-scale but essential support to events open to a range of participants, usually in the form of workshops and conferences. A variety of meeting formats (including virtual conferences) are eligible for support. Applications for up to £400 in support of necessary event costs (typically travel expenses or publicity costs) may be submitted to the HWJ administrator (historyworkshopjournal@gmail.com) at any time of year, normally no less than nine months prior to the event. A decision will usually be made within four months of receipt. Full details are provided on p. 4 of this issue. [End Page 1]

The inaugural editorial in History Workshop Journal 1 noted that 'Democratic scholarship means a two-way relationship between writer and reader' and hoped for 'an active readership not an armchair one'. It urged readers to write in with their letters, to make use of the interactive possibilities of features including the Letters Pages, Noticeboard and Calendar in advancing a collective, or even communal, model of historical practice: 'Far too much research which would be enriched by historical companionship is carried on in conditions of competitive individualism or lonely isolation'. For the first fifteen years of the journal's history, this commitment to dialogue and debate remained very evident: looking back over early issues of the journal one has a genuine sense of an active readership, notwithstanding the contrived (and temporally extended) nature of the 'conversations' which took place in these pages. In more recent years, if the truth be told, these conversations have become rather more staid and indeed more academic: ironically, moreover, we have been slow to grasp the significance of the age of web-based communication for our original project. For, in a remarkably short space of time, electronic media have transformed the processes of researching, writing, archiving, and disseminating history. By opening those processes up to a wide range of participants, the internet offers exciting possibilities for realizing some of the original ambitions of the workshop movement.

In this context, we hope our readers will find interest and indeed inspiration in a new project currently at the planning stage: History Workshop Online. This initiative will not replace the journal, in either its print or electronic formats – indeed, it will promote, publicize and draw new readers to the journal. But it will also allow us to reach...

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