The Raphael Samuel Archive is housed at:

Bishopsgate Library, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 4QH

Phone          0207 3929270

Website       www.bishopsgate.org.uk 

Contact        library@bishopsgate.org.uk

 

ADMINISTRATIVE/BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY:

Raphael Samuel was born in London in 1934, the son of Jewish parents, and was educated at King Alfred's School, Hampstead, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by and became friends with historian Christopher Hill. During this time, Samuel became a Marxist, joining the Communist Party and the Communist Party Historian's Group; the latter an organisation formed by E.P.Thompson, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm, Maurice Dobb and others. The Communist Party Historian's Group founded the journal Past and Present, which aimed to pioneer the study of working class history.

In 1956 Samuel left the Communist Party and was one of the founder editors, together with Stuart Hall and Charles Taylor, of what was soon to become New Left Review. In 1962 Samuel was appointed Tutor in Sociology at Ruskin College, Oxford, a trade-union supported institution which prepared for university working people who had left school without qualifications. While at Ruskin, Samuel also launched a series of national workshops, starting in 1966, on topics previously neglected including women's history, the history of childhood, empire and patriotism, the changing definitions of nations and the cultural diversity of Britain. Participation in these workshops was to remain extremely popular into the 1970s and 1980s, and many of its contributors became initial writers for the History Workshop Journal, founded in 1975. Samuel was made Professor at the University of East London in 1996, although died shortly after.

His publications include: Village Life and Labour (1975), Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers (1977), People's History and Socialist Theory (1981), East End Underworld (1981), Culture, Ideology and Politics (1983), Theatres of the Left: 1880-1935 (1985), The Lost World of Communism (1986), The Enemy Within: The Miners' Strike of 1984 (1987), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (1989), Patriotsm: Minorities and Outsiders (1989), The Myths We Live By (1990), Theatres of Memory (1996) and Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (1997).

SCOPE AND CONTENT:

· Working papers on the heritage of East London

· Doctoral notes on the Victorian poor

· Ethnographic contribution to Michael Young's pioneering sociological research on family and kinship in Bethnal Green

· Records concerning the East End underworld gathered through the oral history of Arthur Harding, criminal and Barnardo boy

· Printed and manuscript material, including notes, correspondence, publication drafts, photographs, slides, pamphlets, annotated newspaper and journal extracts concerning all aspects of Raphael Samuel's work, publications and career

· 140 audio and video cassettes containing recordings of radio and television appearances and conversations with other historians, reels of film, photographs and index cards

 

EXTENT: 418 boxes, 140 cassettes