Historians Group of the CPGB

A subdivision of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), the Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG) formed a highly influential cluster of British Marxist historians, who contributed to "history from below" from 1946 to 1956. Famous members included such leading lights of 20th-century British history as Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel and E. P. Thompson, as well as non-academics like A. L. Morton and Brian Pearce.

In keeping with their standing positions, many of the members carried out their projects from adult education institutions, rather than the academy. In 1952 several of the members founded the influential social history journal Past and Present.

In their work we can read two definite aims:

This dualism was represented by Marx and Engels' dictum that "men make their own history, but they do not do so in conditions of their own choosing", which is regularly paraphrased in CPHG members' texts.

Revisiting and reinstating popular agency in the narrative of British history required originality and determination in the research process, to draw out marginal voices from texts in which they were barely mentioned or active. The techniques influenced both feminist historians and the Subaltern Studies Group, writing the histories of marginalised groups.

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