Past & Present (journal)

• 1. Introduction

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  Past and Present, the British historical journal, arrived in 1952 with a subtitle that announced its ambitions plainly: A Journal of Scientific History. That phrase was a provocation. It planted a flag against the mainstream political history of the day, claiming that the real subject of historical inquiry was society itself, not the decisions of kings and cabinets. Who were the people who founded it, and what did they believe history was for? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Founders and Their Convictions

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  John Morris edited the journal from 1952 until 1960 and continued as chairman of the editorial board until 1972. He was not working alone. Among the founding circle were members of the Communist Party Historians Group, a cohort that included E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel, Rodney Hilton, and Dona Torr. Gordon Childe, the archaeologist and scholar of prehistory, was a founder member of the board as well.

  The mix of Marxist and non-Marxist historians in that original group was deliberate. All of them shared a dissatisfaction with the journals that dominated the field. What distinguished the Marxist wing in particular was an approach known as History from Below, a commitment to explaining the history of class, labour, and social relations through the lives of ordinary people rather than through the decisions of those in power.

  The Annales school of historians, based in France, also shaped the journal's orientation from the start. That tradition aimed to write history in its totality, drawing on economics, geography, and social life rather than confining itself to political events. Past and Present absorbed both of these currents and became the place where they met on British soil.

• 3. Thompson and the Turning Point

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  E. P. Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class in 1963, and after that the influence of Past and Present expanded markedly across the historical discipline. The book demonstrated in practice what the journal had been arguing in theory: that the texture of working-class life was a legitimate and richly evidenced subject for serious historical writing.

  The History Workshop movement, founded in the 1960s, extended that impulse further. It aimed to become a platform for the study of ordinary people, a phrase that captured something the journal had been trying to do since its first issue. Past and Present had helped create the intellectual ground on which that movement could stand.

• 4. Structure and Reach Today

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  Oxford University Press now publishes Past and Present four times a year on behalf of the Past and Present Society, which is registered as a charity and functions as a British historical membership association. The society does more than publish the journal. It runs a book series called Past and Present Publications, sponsors occasional conferences, and appoints postdoctoral fellows.

  Joanna Innes, the Winifred Holtby Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Somerville College, University of Oxford, serves as the current chair of the editorial board. The presence of a named postdoctoral fellowship program signals the society's investment in the next generation of historians who will carry forward the tradition the journal was built to represent.