Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

battles and treaties, i.e. top-level decision-makers both political and military. In other words, they wanted a much broadened or democratized as well as methodologically sophisticated field of history. They were in favour of a history fertilized by the social sciences (including notably social anthropology), which is why the Annales broadened out from economic and social history to the subtitle Economies, Societes, Civilisations. When, fifteen years after the end of Hitler, a postwar generation of modernizers began to make its mark on German history, in the German Federal Republic it chose the banner of ‘Historical Social Science’.

As I have already hinted, the historical modernizers, though united against historical conservatives, were neither ideologically nor politically homogeneous. The inspiration of the French was in no way Marxist, except for the historiography of the French Revolution, which, being safely anchored in the harbour of the Sorbonne, had nothing to do with the Annales school. (Braudel once told me regretfully that the trouble with French history in his lifetime was that its two major figures, he and Ernest Labrousse of the Sorbonne, were brothers who could not get on.) In Britain, on the other hand, the Marxists were unusually prominent, and the journal Past & Present , which emerged from the discussions of the Communist Party Historians’ Group, became the modernizers’ chief medium.

17. Trafalgar Square 1961: sit-down demonstration against nuclear arms (Daily Herald, 18 September 1961)

18. Trafalgar Square 1961: historian among policemen

19. A married couple: Marlene and EH (Castelgiuliano, 1971)

20. Before the era of computers (1970s)

SOME FRIENDS: 21. (above left) Georg Eisler: Comintern child, painter, wit

22. (above right) Pierre Bourdieu: how to understand (and criticize) societies

23. (below left) Ralph Gleason: ‘Dizzy Gillespie for President!’

24. (below right) Clemens Heller: music-lover and impresario of minds

25. Latin America: with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brasilia, Brazil 1995)

26. Latin America: Hortensia Allende, widow of Salvador Allende (Santiago, Chile 1998)

27. Latin America: lecturing under Orozco murals (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1997)

28. Wales: above Llyn, Arddy, Gwynedd (1980s)

29. Wales: in Gwenddwr, Powys (1990s)

30. Looking back on the Cold War: EH and Markus Wolf in discussion on Dutch television

31. An old historian

The rebel Germans, a postwar generation, were largely formed by their studies in Britain and the USA, and tended to Max Weber rather than Marx, as against the home-grown Marxism of the British Communist Party Historians’ Group. Yet we all recognized each other as allies. Past & Present acknowledged the inspiration of Annales in the first paragraph of its first issue. For Annales Jacques Le Goff (‘a reader from the beginning, an admirer, a friend, almost (if I may say so) a secret lover’ ⁵) compared Past & Present with his journal, while the chief of the new Germans appears to regard ‘the astonishing effect of the Marxist historians’ generation’ as the main factor behind ‘the global impact of English historiography since the 1960s’.⁶

At this stage history in the USA (as distinct from the US social sciences) still played a relatively minor international role. In fact, there was little real contact between it and the old world, except in fields of traditional interest to US Europeanists, such as the French Revolution, and in the fields brought with them from Europe by the German exiles after 1933. But Europeanists were a minority, distrusted as cosmopolitan Ivy Leaguers by the great bulk of generally monoglot historians whose subject was the history of the USA, a subject which, as treated by most of them, had very little in common with what historians elsewhere were doing. Only slavery was a subject that aroused international interest, but the younger historians of this subject who were to make a mark abroad were very untypical of the profession in the fifties and sixties. They included several young postwar members of the American Communist Party – Herb Gutman, the brilliant Gene Genovese and the former national secretary of the Young Communist League and subsequent Nobel Prize laureate, the endlessly ingenious Bob Fogel.

Curiously enough, this was true even of so patently global a subject as economic history, which may explain