People's History

The People’s history is a branch of history which deals with the study of the common people rather than the political and other leaders. 

The idea of people's history goes back to the later eighteenth century. In the classical tradition of Greece and Rome, which was revived at the Renaissance, history was regarded as a 'noble' literary genre, like epic and tragedy. Epic, tragedy and history were all supposed to be concerned with the great deeds of great men. To mention ordinary people was generally considered to be beneath what was called the 'dignity of history'. An example of what this view meant in practice is the following: the Roman emperor Vitellius who was deserted in his final moments by everyone except his cook. When the Roman patrician Tacitus came to write about this episode in his history, he couldn’t bring himself in order to write the word 'cook'. He referred rather more vaguely to 'one of the meanest' in the emperor's household. Given this idea of what was 'dignified', people's history, and social history in general, simply could not develop.

It's true that classical historians, notably Herodotus, and Renaissance historians, too, were interested in what they called the 'manners' or customs of different peoples. They were aware that the way in which (say) the Scythians behaved was different from the way in which the Greeks behaved, and so on. But they did not realize that these customs changed over time. They were aware that law and language changed over time, that new laws were made and that new words came into use, but they were not aware of changes in what we would call 'society'.

In England there was Macaulay; the famous third chapter of the History of England he published in 1848 is an early English example of people's history, and of course later on J.R. Green wrote his Short History of the English People. But the English were a little backward in this respect compared to the Swedes and the Czechs.

Questionnaire:

• What is people’s history?
• Explain more about the people’s history.