Casualties of History: Preface
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2020
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to Casualties of History, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. We’ll be working our way through EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. In this first episode, Alex and Gabe introduce themselves and cover the book’s preface, as well as outline the context in which it was written. Who was Thompson, and what was he aiming to do in writing this book? Who was he arguing with, and why?
Reference is made to secondary literature:
Perry Anderson, “Origins of the Present Crisis,” New Left Review 1, no. 23 (Jan-Feb 1964).
EP Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the English,” Socialist Register (1965).
Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present no. 38 (Dec 1967).
Frederick Cooper, “Work, class and empire: An African historian's retrospective on E. P. Thompson,” Social History 20, no. 2 (1995).
Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line(University of Michigan, 2006).
Madeleine Davis, “Reappraising British socialist humanism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 18, no. 1 (2013).
Davis, “Edward Thompson's Ethics and Activism 1956–1963: Reflections on the Political Formation of The Making of the English Working Class,” Contemporary British History 28, no. 4 (2014).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So, Gabe. |
| 0:02.0 | Hi Alex. |
| 0:04.0 | How's it going? |
| 0:05.0 | I'm okay. How are you? |
| 0:07.0 | Pretty good. |
| 0:08.0 | I'm just out here in Bushwick in my very dark room because I've blocked out the windows so that we can record. |
| 0:16.0 | Day 200 or 300 of the quarantine? |
| 0:19.0 | I don't actually know when the quarantine started, nor did I, I think I sort of was one of those jerks who was still |
| 0:24.8 | was sort of taking long walks when you weren't supposed to be anymore so I can't really |
| 0:28.4 | say the number of days it's been I don't want people to yell at me it It's impossible to know. Yeah, I'm recording from my bed which I figured is the closest thing in my apartment to a carpeted room, which I'm told is preferable for right podcast report recording but right I have a carpet that's about two by six so hopefully that's adequate to the job |
| 0:51.6 | it's a little red carpet in my room that's adequate to the job. |
| 0:52.8 | It's a little red carpet in my room. |
| 0:55.8 | So why don't we start by introducing ourselves |
| 0:58.0 | and then talk about why we're doing this show? |
| 1:00.6 | What is this show? |
| 1:01.5 | What's it called? |
| 1:07.0 | This show is casualties of history, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. |
| 1:11.0 | Nice. Sounds cool. Why is it called that? It's called that because that is a famous line from the book, The Making of the English |
| 1:16.5 | Working Class, written by Edward Palmer or EP Thompson in 1963. |
| 1:22.8 | One of the most famous lines in one of the most famous works of history published in the 20th century. |
| 1:27.8 | However, it's a book that's 800 odd pages, so a lot of people kind of mean to read it for |
| 1:31.8 | a long time without having read it. |
... |
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