History and Today

I've just come back from a morning at the annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers . I was an interloping guest, as a historian, on a panel commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Making of the English Working Class . Chaired by Neil Gray , and speaking alongside Carl Griffin who spoke about Thompson's interpretation of Gramsci and its influence (or not) on historical geographers, and David Featherstone and Paul Griffin , who considered agency and the international influences of Thompson's work. I append the long version of my paper below, but first I must remark on some of the things that struck me as a relative 'outsider' and newbie to a geography conference. how vibrant and exciting many aspects of new geography seem; that many of the papers are essentially history or sociology, but are informed by a much greater knowledge and framework of theory and/or practical applications than equivalent history papers how...

Ian Newman of UCLA runs a great blog on the pubs used by the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s. http://lcspubs.blogspot.co.uk/ He's mapped the pubs on a google map , and so I took the kml file and mapped it on an 18th century map of London (unfortunately only from 1736 - I would love this to be mapped on http://www.locatinglondon.org/ or on a more contemporary map of London, but none were available on http://maps.nypl.org/warper/ ) Here's what it looks like. LCS pubs mapped on 18thc map of London John Barrell, in his book The Spirit of Despotism,  has also mapped the spaces of the LCS. But I think the best description of the LCS's reach is still by E. P. Thompson, in the opening section of The Making of the English Working Class : At one end, the London Corresponding Society reached out to the coffee-houses, taverns and dissenting churches off Piccadilly, Fleet Street and the Strand where the self-educated journeyman might rub shoulders with the pri...