Raphael Samuel

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Raphael Samuel pictured by eponymous Centre

Raphael Samuel (September 26, 1934, London - December 9, 1996, London) was a Marxist historian. He was professor of history at the University of East London at the time of his death. Samuel's mother, Minna Nerenstein, was an active member of the British Communist Party which Samuel was also a member of from his teenage years until 1956.

At University, Samuel became a member of the Communist Party Historians Group, alongside Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson and others. He co-founded the journal, Past and Present in 1952, and pioneered the study of working-class history. He founded the History Workshop movement at Ruskin College, Oxford, where he was a teacher in 1967. Samuel's archive is held at Bishopsgate Library.

After his 1996 death, the East London History Centre of the University of East London was renamed the Raphael Samuel History Centre in honor of his role in creating it. The Centre was established to investigate and document the history of London since the eighteenth century. Consistent with Samuel's belief that historical studies should extend outside the academy, the Centre encourages research in the community, and the publication of materials ranging from monographs by established scholars to student dissertations and ‘Notes and Queries’ features in the local press.[1]

In an obituary in the journal Radical Philosophy, Carolyn Steedman describes Samuel's work:

Like Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson, he produced his historical work in interaction with working-class adult returners to education...The standard charge against the history Samuel inspired was of a fanatical empiricism and a romantic merging of historians and their subjects in crowded narratives, in which each hard-won detail of working lives, wrenched from the cold indifference of posterity, is piled upon another, in a relentless rescue of the past. When he was himself subject to these charges, it was presumably his fine — and immensely detailed — accounts of the labour process that critics had in mind. But it was meaning rather than minutiae that he cared about.[2]

[edit] Reference

McWilliam, Rohan "Samuel, Raphael" pages 1047-1048 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing Volume 2, edited by Kelly Boyd, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999, ISBN 1-884964-33-8.
Thompson, Paul "Raphael Samuel, 1934-96: An Appreciation" pages 30-37 from Oral History, Volume 25, 1997.

[edit] Selected bibliography

Samuel, Raphael (1975). Village Life and Labour.
Samuel, Raphael (1977). Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers.
Samuel, Raphael (1981). People's History and Socialist Theory, History Workshop Series. Routledge Kegan & Paul. ISBN 0-7100-0765-5.
Samuel, Raphael (1981). East End Underworld.
Samuel, Raphael (1983). Culture, Ideology and Politics.
Samuel, Raphael (1985). Theatres of the Left: 1880-1935.
Samuel, Raphael (1986). The Lost World of Communism.
Samuel, Raphael (1987). The Enemy Within: The Miners' Strike of 1984.
Samuel, Raphael (1989). Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity : Minorities and Outsiders, History Workshop. Routledge Kegan & Paul. ISBN 0-415-02773-X.
Samuel, Raphael (1989). Patriotism (Volume 2): Minorities and Outsiders, History Workshop. Taylor & Francis Books Ltd. ISBN 0-415-01302-X.
Samuel, Raphael (1990). The Myths We Live By.
Samuel, Raphael (1996). Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso. ISBN 1-85984-077-9.
Samuel, Raphael (1997). Island Stories: Unravelling Britain. London: Verso. ISBN 1-85984-190-2.
Samuel, Raphael (2006). The Lost World of British Communism. London: Verso. ISBN 1-84467-103-8.