A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society

NOTES

NOTES Preface and Acknowledgments 1. These twin quotations come respectively from George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949), and George Santayana , The Life of Reason (New York: Charles Scribner, 1905). I’ve taken my versions from Anthony Jay, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 276, 314. 2. The ‹rst quoted phrase is taken from the jacket description of Alun Munslow and Robert A. Rosenstone, eds., Experiments in Rethinking History (New York: Routledge, 2004); the second from the title of Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997). 3. Sylvia Thrupp (1903–97) was born in England but migrated to British Columbia with her family at the age of ‹ve. She received her Ph.D. from the University of London in 1931, returning to Canada in 1935 where she taught ‹rst at the University of British Columbia (1935–44) and then at the University of Toronto (1945). From 1945 to 1961 she taught at the University of Chicago. Together with many articles on guilds and historical demography, she published two major books, The Worshipful Company of Bakers of London (London: Galleon Press, 1933), and The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300–1500 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989; orig. pub. 1948). A collection of her essays was published as Raymond Grew and Nicholas H. Steneck, eds., Society and History: Essays by Sylvia L. Thrupp (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977). 4. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” in Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 239. Chapter 1 1. To take one small, but telling, example, at the end of my Oxford bachelor’s degree program, in summer 1970, my history ‹nals consisted of 205 eight three-hour sit-down exams covering the entirety of my studies during the previous three years, including a chosen period of European history. By distributing questions on either side of World War I, the examiners for “Europe, 1856–1939” contrived to end the ‹rst part of the exam in 1914 and open the second part in 1918, thereby conveniently abolishing the Russian Revolution. Yet I can’t have been the only undergraduate during 1967–70 to have devoted a big part of my studies to understanding the crisis of czarism and the Bolshevik seizure of power. In general, the Oxford history curriculum of those years remained a chipped and crumbling monument to a dusty and cloistered lack of imagination, against which the efforts of the undergraduate History Reform Group, dating from 1961, made absolutely no impact. My proudest undergraduate accomplishment was to have been denounced to the faculty board by Regius Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper (aka Lord Dacre) in 1970 for editing the History Reform Group’s duplicated journal, The Oxford Historian. For the forming of the group, see Tim Mason, “What of History?” The New University 8 (December 1961), 13–14. The occasion of Mason’s article was a review of E. H. Carr’s What Is History?—a key reference point for my generation of historians. See Richard J. Evans’s useful introduction to the new edition, in Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), ix–xlvi. 2. Winston Churchill, The Second World War, 6 vols. (London: Cassell, 1948–54); Arthur Bryant, The Years of Endurance, 1793–1892 (New York: Harper, 1942) and The Years of Victory, 1802–1812 (New York: Harper, 1945). For the Churchill documentary, see Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years (Jack Le Vien, BBC, 1961). 3. See A. J. P. Taylor, Politics in Wartime and Other Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964) and From Napoleon to Lenin: Historical Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). Books by Taylor that formed my ‹rst substantial introduction to German history include The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of Germany since 1815 (London: Methuen, 1961; orig. pub. 1946), The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), Bismarck, the Man and the Statesman (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), and The Origins of the Second World War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961). 4. The debate over Geoffrey R. Elton’s The Tudor Revolution in Government : Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953) and his edited volume The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960) was launched by G. L. Harriss and Penry Williams, in “A Revolution in Tudor History?” Past and Present 25 (July 1963), 3...