ORGANIZATION
Past & Present
The journal founded in 1952 by a group of Marxist and socialist historians—including Hobsbawm—that published his essay "The Machine Breakers" in its inaugural issue and became one of the most influential venues for social and economic history in the twentieth century.
Past & Present, founded in 1952, emerged from a collaboration of Marxist and socialist historians centered in Britain but international in scope. The founding group included Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, John Morris, Eric Rhodes, and Maurice Dobb, with E.P. Thompson joining the circle soon after. The journal's subtitle, "A Journal of Historical Studies," was deliberately modest, but the ambition was substantial: to establish a venue where history written from below—the history of workers, peasants, artisans, and the dispossessed—could be conducted with the same rigor and seriousness that the profession reserved for the study of states, elites, and aggregate economic outcomes. The inaugural issue contained Hobsbawm's "The Machine Breakers," which established both the intellectual program and the analytical standard that the journal would maintain across the following seven decades.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The founding of Past & Present took place in a specific intellectual and