Name Dorothy Thompson Children Kate Thompson | Spouse E. P. Thompson (m. 1948) Role Historian | |
 | ||
Died January 29, 2011, Worcester, United Kingdom Books The Dignity of Chartism, The Chartists, Queen Victoria: Gender a, Outsiders, Dorothy Thompson's Political Similar People E P Thompson, Kate Thompson, Frank Thompson | ||
Dorothy thompson interview june 1941 1941
Dorothy Katharine Gane Thompson (née Towers) (30 October 1923 – 29 January 2011) was a social historian, a leading expert on the Chartist movement.
Contents
- Dorothy thompson interview june 1941 1941
- The silencing of dorothy thompson trailer
- Biography
- Selected articlesworks
- References
The silencing of dorothy thompson trailer
Biography
Born in Greenwich, south-east London, Thompson entered Girton College, Cambridge, in 1942. During the war, her work as an industrial draughtswoman for Royal Dutch Shell interrupted her formal education. Nonetheless, she continued to pursue a career in history and was politically active. She joined the Young Communists, married the historian Edward Thompson in 1948, and moved to Halifax, where Edward worked in adult education and they were both active in the peace movement. They had three children. Kate Thompson, the award-winning children's writer, is their youngest child.
In 1970 Thompson was appointed a lecturer in the School of History at the University of Birmingham, where she remained until 1988. She also was also a visiting scholar on a number of occasions at universities in the U.S.A., as well as in Canada, China and Japan. The Early Chartists (1971) was a groundbreaking collection of documents. The Chartists (1984) set out all the ways in which Thompson sought to revise how Chartism was seen - from the Irish leaders to the vital contribution of women. In January 1995 Thompson was presented with a festschrift, The Duty of Discontent. Edited by Owen Ashton, Stephen Roberts (both her former students) and Robert Fyson, the volume consists of 12 essays spanning the whole range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British social history. The importance of Thompson's writings on Chartism and Irish and women's history is recognised by scholars internationally. Her work, like that of her husband, was always been informed by a passionate radicalism and a deep sympathy for the underdog.
Thompson's position as the most influential historian of Chartism has been re-inforced by two volumes of essays:'Outsiders' (1993) and 'The Dignity of Chartism' (2015).
She was a leading member of the Communist Party Historians Group.