However, for people like myself, the History Workshops about Chartists and battles against enclosure, women factory workers and village schools were exciting examples of history as it ought to be.The first ever Women's Liberation Conference was planned at a Ruskin History Workshop in the autumn of 1969 and women's history in Britain was to develop with close affinities to "history from below". We pieced together the autobiographies of working-class suffrage campaigners, and reconstructed the labour of laundry day before washing machines. At the time, we did not wonder self-consciously why looking at resistance and ordinary life appeared so much more relevant to us than the study of the people with power.Social history was being creatively transformed in this period by the work of historians such as E P Thompson, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm. They were rejecting the focus of earlier labour historians on formal political institutions and seeking to uncover the ideas and aspirations of people who would normally have not been deemed worthy of the attention of posterity.The idea that everyday life was an area of human experience that could be examined was not only surfacing in social history. My generation, growing up in the late 1950s, had read Richard Hoggart's influential Uses of Literacy; we watched the "kitchen sink" plays of Arnold Wesker and John Osborne, the popular television series Z Cars and then the Wednesday Plays.Raphael Samuel himself was interested in all these connections, and in the mix of drama and music which inspired the folk singer Ewan MacColl and the director Joan Littlewood, whose Theatre Workshop drew on everyday experience and popular songs. The assumption that the everyday and the "ordinary" should be considered was thus exercising a pervasive influence upon the broader culture before it began to challenge the definition of history. However, by the late 1980s again it seemed that the dynamism of "history from below" had run into the ground.

The whole approach had become beset by internal doubts and questions which had simply not occurred to the crowds who had packed into Ruskin the decade before.There was no longer agreement about whose vantage point was to be taken from below. It had become evident that people without power could be at odds with one another, because they were of differing genders, races or ethnicities, or simply because of their political views. It was no longer sufficient to be simply at the bottom of the pile, for it had become evident that the popular voice could well be racist or reactionary. Nor was there certainty about uncovering "real" attitudes and experiences of the everyday.

Reality had become a vexed topic and no longer to be taken for granted.These internal questions occurred at a time when an ideological offensive had been mounted by the right to reinstate a perspective on history as the unified history of the nation. Indeed history from above made a triumphal comeback during the Thatcher era with the heritage industry, and the uncritical celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Glorious Revolution. A look at most academic bookshops will confirm that it has maintained its ascendancy.The outcome was not, however, to be a straightforward rout. Instead, social history proceeded to divide into a series of academic sub-groups which incorporated aspects of "history from below": labour history, women's history, gay and lesbian history, black history, oral history, cultural history. All of these raised new areas of study, disputed their own sets of issues and debates, and generated their own vast literature, presenting a daunting disparity to radical historians concerned to connect these increasingly separate realms of knowledge. None the less, they do maintain in fragmented ways countervailing perspectives about how to look at the past.Yet "history from below" has found itself a much broader audience during the past decade.