Robert Colls recalled the power of Thompson's book for his generation of young British leftists:
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E. P. Thompson
Edward Palmer Thompson was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is best known for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963).
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culture · English historian & activist (1924–1993) · writer · historian of Modern Age · historian · novelist · journalist · biographer · labor historian · peace activist · anti–nuclear weapons activist · also E. P. Thompson, Edward P. Thompson, Thompson
Born 3 February 1924 · Died 28 August 1993 · Q434160
18 published statements · 0 followers
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John Mortimer: Now that nuclear weapons exist, you have to face the fact that you would rather be conquered by, say, the Russians than have the world blown up?Thompson: Yes, I think so. Don't you?Mortimer: Better red than dead?Thompson: Yes.Mortimer: So, if nuclear weapons had existed in 1939, we would have had to accept conquest by Hitler to save a nuclear war?Thompson: Yes.
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2013· 1 entry
1993· 1 entry
Died 1993-08-28.
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1991· 1 entry
About his association with the Communist Party
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1982· 1 entry
Awarded honorary doctorate presented by The Open University (1982).
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1978· 1 entry
Published The Poverty of Theory which attacked the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser and his followers in Britain on New Left Review (saying: "
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1968· 1 entry
– a small, fat bundle of Pelican with a picture of a Yorkshire miner on the front – and I still have it, bandaged up and exhausted by the years of labour
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1967· 1 entry
Which posits that reliance on clock-time is a result of the European Industrial Revolution and that neither industrial capitalism nor the creation of the modern state would have been possible without the imposition of sy
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1966· 1 entry
Thompson coined the term "history from below" to describe his approach to social history, which became one of the most consequential developments within the global history discipline
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1963· 2 entries
Before the second-wave feminist movement had fully developed a theoretical gender perspective
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While he was working at the University of Leeds
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1960· 1 entry
Though Thompson and others fell out with the group around Perry Anderson who took over the journal in 1962
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1956· 2 entries
Which revealed that the Soviet party leadership had long been aware of Stalin's crimes, Thompson (with John Saville and others) started a dissident publication inside the CP, called The Reasoner
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Due to its suppression of open debate over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he continued to refer to himself as a "historian in the Marxist tradition", calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the r
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1952· 1 entry
Launched the journal Past and Present
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1948· 1 entry
Thompson married Dorothy Towers, whom he met at Cambridge
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1946· 1 entry
Thompson formed the Communist Party Historians Group with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Dona Torr, and others
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1939· 1 entry
“John Mortimer: Now that nuclear weapons exist, you have to face the fact that you would rather be conquered by, say, the Russians than have the world blown up?Thompson: Yes, I think so. Don't you?Mortimer: Better red than dead?Thompson: Yes.Mortimer: So, if nuclear weapons had existed in 1939, we would have had to accept conquest by Hitler to save a nuclear war?Thompson: Yes.”
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1924· 1 entry
Born 1924-02-03.
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