E. P. Thompson and the Discipline of Historical Context.

The article examines historian E. P. Thompson's legacy to social history by reviewing some of the studies that he pursued for the last thirty years of his life. Arguably the most important founder of the new social history, he was a transformative influence on and an inspiration for two generations of historians. His work held up to changing fashions, making sense as much to readers who grew up with the new cultural history of the late 1980s and 1990s as to those more concerned with labor and social organization twenty years before. Thompson helped to offer Marxism with a human face to a New Left anxious to break out of the orthodoxies.