History Workshop and its Legacies

by Luisa Passerini

I first encountered History Workshop through the pages of the journal, in

197677, and then I met it embodied in members of its collective, at the Oral
History conference at Essex in March 1979. It was an emotional conference,
the first one in which many of us oral historians from various countries
confronted our experiences. A crucial legacy of HW is the continuation of
the convergence we discovered then in conceiving the role of history as
bringing the boundaries of history closer to peoples lives, by paying at-
tention to the daily aspects of social life, such as various forms of subject-
ivity (imagination included), material culture, gender differences and so on.
This went together with the effort to cross the divide separating theory and
empirical practice in history which meant also to find links between history
and other disciplines as well as to present the steps taken in historical
enquiry, not only its results. This legacy has been transformed through
the years (actually the decades) between then and now. The subjects of
history have become much more numerous, being now not only the ones
we started with, such as workers and women, but people of all cultures and
ages. (The journals subtitle used to give some indication of this: A Journal
of Socialist Historians from 19761982 (issues 112), then from issue 13 till
issue 38 A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians. With a dramatic
redesign of the cover from issue 39 (spring 1995) the subtitle was dropped
altogether because there was too much to include.)
Today, they are diasporic subjects of all kinds. My present research is still
inspired by that old idea, but its subjects are migrants to and through
Europe from all over the world. The focus is no longer on oral memory,
it is now on the visual memory of the movement of bodies in global per-
spective. The use of visual sources is today, I believe, a frontier of historical
studies comparable to what oral sources represented in the 1970s and 1980s.
The new conceptual triangle that our time requires us to put in historical
perspective is memory/mobility/visuality.
The accent on visuality too is a legacy of History Workshop Journal,
although in a hidden form. I remember the relevance of images, on the
covers (the miners blackened hands holding a cigarette, on HWJ 2, has
stayed with me) and within the pages of the journal, and of course I have
in mind the attention given to the cinema. But I think especially of an article
by Raphael Samuel on the importance of the visual, in 1978 (HWJ 6),

European University Institute Luisa.Passerini@eui.eu

History Workshop Journal Issue 83 Advance Access Publication 4 May 2017 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbx002
The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.
224 History Workshop Journal

introducing a series of writings on art, politics and ideology. Among them,

an essay by Eric Hobsbawm on man and woman (inverted commas be-
cause I no longer use the singular) in socialist iconography, and the lively
debate it generated, with polemical interventions by Tim Mason, Sally
Alexander, Anna Davin, Eve Hostettler, and Maurice Agulhon (HWJ 7
and 8, 1979).
There is one more legacy of relevance. History Workshop has always had
an instructive (for me) attitude to the relationships between colleagues: a
democratic scholarship, consisting in a combination of friendship, inter-
subjective engagement in common search, honest criticism and yet admir-
ation for each others work (the last being largely unknown in the Italian
universities I had attended). The same mixture of admiration and criticism
can be found in HWJ towards our respected elders and lost comrades, as
Raphael Samuel wrote. There are many instances of giving voice to this
attitude besides the case of Hobsbawm, such as publishing Richard
Johnsons critique of the work of Edward Thompson (HWJ 6, 1978), and
a reflection on The Making of the English Working Class after fifty years by
Selina Todd (HWJ 76, 2013), which gives a deep sense of a critical tradition.
Respect, which I find a major legacy within this critical tradition, is quite
evident in the obituaries that constellate HWJ with a rich and variegated
memory. I was moved, going back to re-read some of the issues, to find
friendly and honest words on so many people I had known, from Tony Judt
to Leonore Davidoff and Stuart Hall. It is not only that respect for each
others work is all the more remarkable when it is coupled with criticism. It
is also a matter of being able to distinguish between the person and the
work. I realized that for me the legacies of HW have been represented
both by the ideas and initiatives of the journal and by the human beings
who worked in and around HW (some of whom became very good friends).
Of the multiple legacies from HW I will just mention two more: very
important has been and still is the insistence on the transmission of the
new history in education and teaching (including the recognition of the
value of undergraduate projects and the work of independent historians).
This insistence, and the initiatives deriving from it, is still very valuable. It
often implies denunciation of the lack of funding from political authorities,
not only for schools but also for libraries, archives, and history departments.
Recently, the link between the website and the journal has been another step
towards the dissemination of historical work.
Equally relevant has been the criticism of objectivity in academic period-
ization and conventional historical method, thanks to the exploration and
valorization of the categories of feminism, the appreciation of the contribu-
tion of psychanalysis to history, and the articulation of subjectivity under-
stood not merely as consciousness. I also recognize a fruitful way of
proceeding in the double attitude of inclining to populism (after all, the
oppressed can be seen today as the majority of people and peoples) and
at the same time stating clearly that subjectivity is not only a matter of
 History Workshop and its Legacies 225

giving voice to the voiceless. Implicitly, this equates to acknowledging the

intersubjective nature of historical interpretation, against the illusion of
positivistic reconstruction.
I have listed legacies that are meaningful for my own work (which in-
cludes memories of Italian fascism, totalitarianism, the generation of 68,
Love in European culture, European Cinema). However, I see many histor-
ians (as well as practitioners of other disciplines of the humanities) belong-
ing to the generations following mine, who do innovative historical research,
following and developing similar lines. I do not claim that the derivation is
direct and I do not know whether these younger scholars would define
themselves as radical. I argue that History Workshop has powerfully con-
tributed to the diffusion of the ideas and practices that constitute these
legacies, so that they have become a sort of atmosphere breathable by
those who want to move the boundaries and approaches of written and
visual history.

Luisa Passerini is Part-time Professor at the European University Institute,

Florence, Italy; former Professor of Cultural History at the University of
Turin, Italy; and Principal Investigator on the European Research Council
Project Bodies Across Borders. Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and
Beyond. Among her books: Women and Men in Love: European Identities in
the Twentieth Century (2012); Sogno di Europa (2009); Memory and Utopia:
the Primacy of Intersubjectivity (2007); Europe in Love, Love in Europe
(1999); Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968 (1996); Fascism in
Popular Memory (1987).