People's History in the Age of Populism

Abstract

Why write people's histories in our age of populism? Much of the original appeal of the genre derived from the marginality its subject once occupied in public life. Ordinary lives were hardly mentioned in school textbooks; popular culture was assigned to the bottom of the nation's hierarchy of values; and popular politics was either criminalised or disciplined to fit national voting patterns in states ruled by bullet and ballot alike. Defining the people naturally set the fault lines between liberal, conservative and socialist practitioners of the genre. J.R. Green's late nineteenth-century prototype – A Short History of the English People – presented a liberal story of social change, from the landing of Hengist to the battle of Waterloo. It incorporated the entirety of social life mushrooming beneath the deeds of kings, in all its evolutionary splendor. On the continent, notably in Central and Eastern Europe, the people would often feature in ethnic garb, in histories of national liberation or imperial projection. Yet it was Marxism, broadly conceived, that provided the most enduring template for people's histories, at least in the Anglosphere, from A.L. Morton's pioneering A People's History of England onwards. Extended beyond strictly national boundaries to topics such as modern Europe or even the world, two recent people's histories written in this vein, both taking their motto from Brecht's Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters, filter their subject through class struggle and offer a narrative of freedom from want in which a vast labouring multitude toils, suffers and rebels across ages. However, political outlook and epistemological commitments aside, for the past century people's history has claimed to restore to the people its own past, often one of misery at the hands of elites yet one all the more dignified for that reason. Do any of these coordinates still obtain today? Is not the current glorification of ordinary lives, popular culture and politics the bread and butter of populism?