People's history
A people's history is a type of historical narrative devised in the United States of America which attempts to account for historical events from the perspective of common people rather than leaders. There is an emphasis on disenfranchised, the oppressed, the poor, the nonconformists, and otherwise marginal groups. Arising in America in response to the development of social history in Europe, authors typically have a Marxist model in mind.
Social history, "History from below" and "people's history"
first used the phrase "histoire vue d'en bas et non d'en haut" in 1932 when praising Albert Mathiez for seeking to tell the "histoire des masses et non de vedettes". People's history was first used in the title of A. L. Morton's 1938 book, A People's History of England. Yet it was E. P. Thompson's essay History from Below in The Times Literary Supplement which brought the phrase to the forefront of historiography from the 1970s. Notably, history From Below appeared as the title of the Thompson article, put there by an anonymous editor. The concept was popularized among non-historians in the United States by Howard Zinn's 1980 book, A People's History of the United States. Zinn's people's history marked the popular rise of the application of social history in scholarship about the United States.Description
A people's history is the history as the story of mass movements and of the outsiders. Individuals not included in the past in other type of writing about history are part of history-from-below theory's primary focus, which includes the disenfranchised, the oppressed, the poor, the nonconformists, the subaltern and the otherwise forgotten people. This theory also usually focuses on events occurring in the fullness of time, or when an overwhelming wave of smaller events cause certain developments to occur. This approach to writing history is in direct opposition to methods which tend to emphasize single great figures in history, referred to as the Great Man theory; it argues that the driving factor of history is the daily life of ordinary people, their social status and profession. These are the factors that "push and pull" on opinions and allow for trends to develop, as opposed to great people introducing ideas or initiating events.In his book A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn wrote: "The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners."