Histories Of A Radical Book E P Thompson And The Making Of The English Working Class Antoinette Burton Editor by Antoinette Burton (editor), Stephanie Fortado (editor) 9781789203288, 1789203287 instant download after payment.

Does a revolution need big books anymore? Did it ever? As we write the 

preface to this re-publication of our retrospective special issue on E. P. 

Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in the summer of 2020, it 

may not be the most important question. The people in the streets—Black, 

Brown, white—are raising fists and holding masks in place, not brandishing 

copies of books, whether larger or small. Some are turning, or returning, 

to James Baldwin. Others reach for Frantz Fanon. His recurrent arguments 

about the ways that colonial occupation made it “impossible … to breathe” 

are an uncanny reminder of the way it has always been for people op-

pressed because of the color of their skin.1

 Or, we read poetry—which, to re-

cast Irish poet Eavan Boland, is “at once an archive of defeat and a diagram 

of victory.”2

 In its comparatively small frame the poem holds the world, and 

seems well-suited to our TLDR/too long didn’t read world. It’s the perfect 

primer, readable off a small screen and committed easily to memory. Who 

has the time or patience to read big books now?