Doing Working-Class History

Economic and political uncertainty has brought the language of class – especially discussion of the working class – to a broad audience across scholarship and social debate. This introductory volume shows how the history of the working class has, is, and can be researched, written, and represented.

The book is structured in three parts: perspective, context, and application. Each offers an introduction to both classic historiography and new ideas and methodologies. With chapters covering a span of the years c.1750–present, the book focuses on three essential questions:

1. What is working-class history and what should it become?
2. What can a focus on working-class history reveal?
3. What are the possibilities of this research in the university classroom, the heritage world, and beyond?

Doing Working-Class History will appeal to students and scholars of working-class history, whether relative newcomers to the field or veteran researchers interested in new approaches and material. It will also be of interest to local and family historians, museum and heritage professionals, and general readers.

Oliver Betts is Research Lead at the National Railway Museum in York. He specialises in the history of technology and class, exploring how working-class worlds across the Anglophone world were reshaped by technologies. He has published on workers, communities, and industry in history and museums.

Laura Harrison is an Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of the West of England. She specialises in histories of youth and youth culture and is the author of Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the Young Working Class, and Urban Space in Britain, c.1870–1939 (2022).

Laura Christine Price is a historian, teacher, and writer. Her PhD thesis, completed at the University of York, explored wool textile workers’ relationships to trade unionism. She is an independent researcher and teaches at a secondary school in West Yorkshire.