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In 1789, Hannah More and her sister Martha (Patty) founded a Sunday school at Cheddar — the first of a series of schools in the Mendips — which marked a significant advance of elementary education in Somerset. The schools are chronicled in Patty More's Mendip Annals. Sunday schools were the latest fashion in philanthropy. The pupils were the children of farmers, miners, and glass-workers. The schools have been criticized by E. P. Thompson and scholars influenced by Michel Foucault, but it is argued here that the Mendip peoples were not the passive recipients of class patronage. The success of the schools led to the setting up of women's benefit clubs in Cheddar and Shipham. The school and club feasts became a distinctive part of Mendip culture. Because of the problems of finding suitably Evangelical teachers, the sisters sometimes had take the potentially dangerous step of recruiting teachers with Methodist sympathies.

The Salvation Army, founded by William and Catherine Booth, began as the East London Christian Mission in 1865. The Booths, along with a small group of associates, preached in the streets of the East End and in rented halls. In 1878, its mission stations were found not only in London but along the south coast, in the Midlands, and in the north, with 127 paid evangelists and 700 voluntary workers. That same year, it adopted the name Salvation Army. Its distinctive uniforms, ranks, and military vocabulary; its tracts, called Hallelujah Torpedoes; and its prayer services, known as knee drill, followed. Salvationists became stock figures of fun in music halls, popular theater, and comic magazines. These battles are critical to an understanding of working-class religiosity and culture more broadly. A second approach to Victorian religion proceeded from the influential work of social historians E. P. Thompson and E. J. Hobsbawm.

This chapter investigates the underlying historical conceptions and agendas of E. P. Thompson and Natalie Davis as seminal figures in the development of the cultural approach. It also discusses the most essential aspects of their work on popular activism, focusing on Davis' article “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France” and Thompson's “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Both of these authors shared a common point of emphasis as they uncovered new topics and methods of analysis—the decisive role of culture as a driving force of historical change. They have decisively shown the significance of cultural and communal factors in motivating activists and illustrated the independent and active role of rioters in making their own history. Additionally, they have advanced the cultural approach to crowd violence by demonstrating the need to pose critical questions about communal notions of legitimacy and meaning.

This essay utilizes the work of British cultural historian E.P. Thompson and German sociologist Max Weber to unpack the “moral economy” of superheroism and, by association, supervillainy. Although not primarily concerned with villain characters, it contributes to our discussion about moral choices in superhero/villain texts, choices that often lead the subjects of such texts to reject what is “legal” for what is “right.”

The physical setting aside, life in the Hong Kong plant turned out to be much more relaxed, even playful, than in Shenzhen, despite the much more advanced age of the Hong Kong women workers. Hegemonic managerial domination replaced Shenzhen's despotism, in which control was visible, overtly imposed, and punishment-oriented. Hegemony, as an alternative mode of domination, assumed a different character. According to Antonio Gramsci and later elaborations by Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, hegemonic power was a totalizing, lived experience of power relations founded on the dominant class's ability to articulate subordinate classes' interests with its own, and to saturate the commonsensical world with dominant meanings. Control was achieved through the internalized discipline of subordinates, who experienced a certain degree of autonomy and legitimacy in their subjection to domination. However, hegemonic domination was an open, contested, historically transformed process.

This chapter explores how workers heard and used music in relation to their sensing of alienation. Music was important for workers because it helped them combat the sounds of alienation and the experience of the passing of slow, alienated time. The chapter also examines the fragility of music as a resource against alienation. It studies this battle against alienation on the same way that E. P. Thompson navigated similarly arid debates on class. Thompson argued that the most fruitful way to approach class was to see it as a lived social process in which people were intimately and actively involved as agents. The chapter uses this as a way of understanding the lived experience of labor as a social process.

This chapter examines the history of commons with examples from India, Mongolia and England. Different approaches to the commons from Garrett Hardin, ElinorOstrom and Marx are discussed. The relationship between property rights and ecological sustainability is outlined.

This chapter considers those who lived and worked under the shadow of the Enlightenment, building a bridge between the visions of Catholic penitents and those who experienced visions in the height of the age of reason. It begins by interrogating E. P. Thompson's Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law in order to look at the antinomianism (“against the law”) of the late seventeenth century, a form of radical dissent that refused to accept conventional Christian ethics, including the rule of the father and the authority of the Church. The major focus, however, will be on Jacob Boehme, who, like his Catholic forbears, was a visionary and experienced a dark night of the soul and a spiritual awakening. In all of his writing, Boehme employed alchemical and occult thinking and reasoning that had considerable impact on English Behmenists, including Blake and, much later on, the philosophical and psychological treatises of Blavatsky and Jung.

This book brings together a collection of essays that explore long-standing themes in labor history and working-class studies as well as contemporary struggles over the relationship between engagement, teaching, and scholarship. The book was the product of a conference held in Iowa City in 2011 to honor labor historian Shelton Stromquist. The essays support the argument that scholar activism and engaged teaching are and should be pursued by more than a rarified and well-connected elite. The contributors recognize that class and conflict, the frictions of daily life, are central to engaged scholarship and teaching, and suggest the need to continue rethinking relationships between scholars, the university, and the wider world. This book demonstrates the many ways that scholars and teachers can be effective advocates when acting outside traditional definitions of their academic work. It consists of three sections that focus on developments in engaged scholarship that build on the legacies of E. P. Thompson, David Montgomery, and their contemporaries.

This chapter traces the history of the early paths of engaged scholarship blazed by progressive labor economists who, at some professional risk, gave birth to labor history as a serious field of inquiry and by the subsequent pioneering work of two labor historians and activists: E. P. Thompson and David Montgomery. Thompson and Montgomery not only reshaped the academic field but influenced subsequent generations of engaged scholars. Of particular importance were Thompson's and Montgomery's experiences outside of academia, notably in labor and left political circles. The chapter points out that the generation of labor historians following Thompson and Montgomery shared their attention to class, their affinity for grassroots activism, and their advocacy for participatory democracy. At the same time, the succeeding generations of scholars, responding to changed political and intellectual contexts, have pursued new forms of engagement.

Varieties of social History comprised the most successful initial challenge to political History, especially from the middle of the twentieth century. From the 1980s social History was gradually supplanted in prominence by a cluster of related historiographical developments concerned with language and culture. In the last fifteen years or so newer fashions have waxed, and to those too this chapter will attend, but, in terms of justifications for History, social History and the linguistic and cultural ‘turns’ remain especially important. Social-scientific social historians were more apt to assert History’s predictive value or at least its pragmatic contemporary importance at a time of industrialization beyond the north Atlantic—this was an update of History as Practical Lesson. Other social historians were to be found revising prevailing conceptions of the past with a view to altering politics in the present—disturbing ‘whiggish’ narratives, or inserting the marginalized into the historical record to fortify their voices now. This was History as Identity fused with History as Emancipation. ‘New cultural historians’ specialized in a version of History as Travel as they invoked exotic worlds past. They, like historians under the influence of Michel Foucault, who addressed culture through the prism of power, might adapt the Travel rationale, contrasting past ways of doing things with present ways in order to unmask the conventional, made and remade, character of social relations and of human-being, and thus the possibility of changing them. This was a Marxist agenda of History as Emancipation adapted for a post-Marxist philosophy.

A body calling itself the London Statistical Society existed in the late 1820s and was responsible for the publication of the Statistical Illustrations of … the British Empire. Historians have largely dismissed it as unimportant, or lacking in evidence of institutional life. This chapter establishes the Society as the confluence of a national network of committees of artisans who, since 1817, had collected data and statistics to demonstrate the decline in living standards among the working classes across the early nineteenth century. The key figure was the Clerkenwell watchmaker and radical journalist, John Powell, an associate of the leading London trades’ unionist of this era, the Thames shipwright, John Gast. Powell set forth an economic philosophy based on cooperation, criticized elite corruption, and tried to show the relationships between rising crime, pauperism and poverty, and falling real wages. He mounted a critique of Ricardian economics—the doctrines and ideas of David Ricardo, which favoured laissez-faire and free trade, as set forth in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), and which depended on a priori deductions rather than evidence. Powell foreshadowed other members of the Statistical Movement like Jones and Whewell, who, in the 1830s, also opposed orthodox economics. The chapter thus substantiates the existence of artisan statisticians at this time and of intellectual linkages which define the identity of the Statistical Movement as a whole. It situates working-class statistics within the different genres of working-class protest described by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class.

The Introduction sets the stage, posing the principal questions this book will confront, synthesizing the social science literature that it borrows from and will contest, explaining two principal and problematic keywords that run through the book—revolt and popolo. It then introduces the primary sources and databases constructed from them to analyse how revolts and ideals of democracy changed from the communal period in Italy of the thirteenth century to the period of Italian wars, 1494–1559. In this staging, the introduction also engages with the vast historiography on popular revolt and protest over the late medieval and early modern periods across much of Europe and points to the enigma of the paucity of such work for early modern Italy, especially before the Neapolitan revolt of Masaniello in 1647. This paucity is doubly enigmatic given the importance of the late medieval revolt, especially in Tuscany and Umbria, and the rich scholarship on it since the late nineteenth century.

This chapter begins by reviewing the historiography of food riots from Camille-Ernest Labrousse in the 1940s to the twenty-first century. Against much of this literature, the chapter argues that these riots of subsistence were not the principal form of revolt in ‘preindustrial times’ as has often been alleged; nor was scarcity a principal pre-condition of popular revolt. However, by the mid-1470s and through the sixteenth century, food riots became more common and a conjuncture between scarcity and revolt was no longer negatively linked as it had been during the Middle Ages. Moreover, the chapter finds two sorts of bread riots in early modern Italy, and historians have yet to recognize the differences. One form—the rarer of the two—was composed mostly of starving women and children, often accompanied by impoverished men from the countryside. Neither leaders nor targets were generally mentioned; their cries were for mercy and bread with little violence or repression ensuing. The second form was revolts of the popolo, comprised mostly of armed adult men, who elected their leaders, and chose distinct targets such as granaries or ships ready to export grain. In addition, these were enmeshed within broader revolts often with larger constitutional and political objectives.

This chapter begins with the observation that a number of literary critics in this period express the hope that a new form of ‘cultural history’ would provide the basis for an evaluative assessment of the direction of social change. They look to those trained as critics, not to historians, for such an approach, one that tries to identify the ‘quality of living’ in evidence in various periods. The chapter shows how such work played an important part in a wider public’s understanding of history in the years between the 1940s and the 1970s, with the Pelican Guide to English Literature providing a notable illustration. The chapter suggests that the reception of Williams’s unconventional book, The Long Revolution, in 1961 can be seen to mark the end of the style of work considered in the previous chapters.