I see Kynaston has reviewed the Selina Todd book I mentioned earlier in the thread. He seems to like it.
The timing is apt for Selina Todd's examination of what she calls "the rise and fall" of the working class. Inequality of outcome remains gapingly wide, Ukip palpably feed off "left behind" working-class disenchantment with the established political elite, and the head of policy at the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission wants working-class children to behave more like middle-class children in order to increase their currently slender chances of getting into the best universities.
There is a longer shadow, though, lurking behind this book: EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. Published in 1963, and demanding an end to "the enormous condescension of posterity" towards the working class, it became an almost instant classic and over the next two decades exercised huge sway over younger historians. But then things changed. Just as the defeat of the miners in 1985 conclusively crushed the politics of class, leaving the Labour party without a clear purpose, so historians turned increasingly to the more individualistic politics of identity, above all those of gender and ethnicity – to the despair of at least one historian, Tony Judt, trained in the old progressive verities. Suddenly class seemed irrelevant, sociology and economic history departments struggled to attract students, and cultural studies boomed.
Put another way, The People is a book we badly need. It is also a book the author badly needed to write. The 2000s saw two notable if smaller-scale histories-cum-memoirs by working-class writers – The Likes of Us by Michael Collins and Estates by Lynsey Hanley – and now in 2014 this is similarly fuelled by a personal working-class background. "I looked in vain for my family's story when I went to university to read history," relates Todd (born in 1975), "and continued to search for it fruitlessly throughout the next decade. Eventually I realised that I would have to write this history myself."
To a large extent she succeeds. The People offers a clear, compelling, broadly persuasive narrative of a century of British history as seen through working-class eyes and from a working-class perspective. Todd avoids hectoring, but by the end one is left suitably angry: the people have been screwed.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/a ... rewed-todd" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
This also looks interesting - counterfactual history is a bit of a bugbear of mine.
Counterfactuals are the byproduct of a paranoid nostalgia specific to the right, where "greatness" is forever being sabotaged by leftists, liberals or whoever. If you subscribe to the notion of Britain as an intrinsically unrevolutionary country, you must write Cromwell's victory in the English civil war out of existence; if you long for the British empire, you must prove, as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts endeavour to do, that staying out of the first world war or a separate peace with Hitler might have saved it. Evans's critique of these "parlour games" is strong, and particularly so for taking the likes of Ferguson a lot more seriously than perhaps they deserve. Evans notes the lack of counterfactuals on the left, though notes the tendency of otherwise systematic left-leaning historians – he names EH Carr – to slip into the counterfactual of "if Lenin had lived", something he ascribes to Carr's belief that, at least economically, the Soviet Union was "progressive".
Carr himself was sharply dismissive of the way his fellow Soviet historian Stephen F Cohen resorted to counterfactuals in narrating the stories of Bukharin or Gorbachev as a way of arguing that the disasters of Stalin or Yeltsin were not inevitable. How different is Evans's rigorous, unromantic statement about past events that "there was no alternative" and the common statement about the present that "there is no alternative"? Evans implicitly points to the way in which "history from below", such as EP Thompson's Making of the English Working Class and Eric Hobsbawm's Primitive Rebels, resurrects lost "alternatives" without needing to resort to falsification; a conservative version of this impulse might be Norman Davies's recent exhuming of various picturesque Vanished Kingdoms.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/a ... ory-review" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.