E. P. Thompson

Biography

British historian, a central figure of Marxist humanism and the British New Left, who taught at the University of Leeds and the University of Warwick, resigning from Warwick in 1971 in protest at its commercialisation. His 1963 book The Making of the English Working Class rewrote the social history of industrialisation as history from below and is regarded as a founding work of the field. He coined the phrase history from below in 1966, helped found the journal Past and Present in 1952, and answered Althusserian structural Marxism in The Poverty of Theory (1978). In 2011 History Today ranked him the second most important historian of the previous sixty years, after Fernand Braudel.