OAH Report--Session on E.P. Thompson

[Jim Oberly, History Dept., U of Wisc-Eau Claire]

Crossposted from H-Post......


       Thanks to Mel Dubofsky <Dubof@BINGVMB> for submitting this
       report.
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       On Friday afternoon 15 April about 100 people attended a
       panel at the annual meeting of the Organization of American
       historians that discussed Edward P. Thompson's impact on the
       writing of social and labor history in the United States.
       David Montgomery of Yale University, who worked closely with
       Thompson at the Centre for the Study of Social History at
       the the U. of Warwick, 1967-69 and who remained a close
       friend thereafter, chaired the session. Paul Faler of the
       University of Massachusetts-Boston, Theresa Murphy of George
       Washington U., and Susan Pennybacker of Trinity University
       presented the formal papers.
            Faler focused on Thompson's influence on history
       graduate students who came of age in the late 1960s, early
       1970s, viewing that influence from the perspective of his
       own understanding of labor history. He stressed how Thompson
       by giving a cultural foundation and focus to class and
       endowing ordinary working people with agency made history
       come alive for Faler and his generation of young historians
       Faler, however, suggested that what Thompson's history so
       alive and relevant in the 1960s-70s gives it a mroe dated
       quality today, when, in Faler's own words, the academic
       study of labor history has become a "rust bowl." Thompson,
       concluded Faler, wrote a history of radicalism and
       oppositional cultures that neglected other aspects of the
       working-class experience, especially the darker and more
       reactionary features that merit more attention from
       historians.
            Theresa Murphy stressed how Thompson's analysis of
       Methodism and religion as a vital part of the working-class
       experience encouraged her generation of graduate students to
       examine previously neglected aspects of working-class
       history. Although Thompson evinced great disdain for
       organized religion, esp. in its Methodist guise, he made
       that aspect of workers' everyday experiences come alive.
            Susan Pennybacker also stressed Thompson's interest in
       the religious beliefs and experiences of working people,
       though she tried to set Thompson's work in a comparative
       context. Pennybacker asserted that Thompson's history, the
       questions he posed and the answers that he found, flowed
       directly from substantial differences in U.S. and English
       historical, political, and academic cultures.
            All three formal papers focused primarily on Thompson's
       THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS, not on the larger
       body of his writing. In closing, summary remarks, however,
       Montgomery suggested that Thompson's history spanned a wide
       range of chronological eras and subjects yet shared a common
       theme--how in reaction to capitalism's inexorable
       exploitation common people developed anti-market, and
       anti-commodity practices and beliefs. Thompson, said
       Montgomery, portrayed workers as enjoying a real life with
       real joys as well as experiencing suffering and sorrow.
       Montgomery concluded by observing that Thompson's influence
       will live wherever people struggle for justice, autonomy,
       and space in their lives.
            A variety of lively interjections from members of the
       audience, especially those who had known Thompson personally
       and worked with him, followed. James Green and Alan Dawley
       offered especially warm tributes in explaining how Thompson
       had influenced their own evolution as historians of labor
       and common people. Barbara Winslow, a graduate student of
       Thompson's at Warwick in 1969-70, suggested that although
       Thompson neglected women in most of his own historical
       writing, he offered great encouragement to her and other
       women graduate students at Warwick who wanted to research
       and write a new sort of women's history. Finally, I
       suggested that Thompson must be understood as being as much
       a creative literary "giant" as an academic historian or
       political activist, and that he was truly one of a kind.
       ----Mel Dubofsky