ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s, when Peter Bailey’s book was published, cultural studies and social history seemed for a time to march together. Cultural studies was formed in a critical relationship to Marxism (itself a theory of history) and its founding texts included the essentially historical works of Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson.1 A lot of people think history is about ‘the facts’—what actually happened: but anyone with a rudimentary grasp of cultural theory can see that history is also a work of construction and representation, in which ‘the facts’ mean nothing without theories and concepts. History in the 1970s was turning away from blind empiricism to a more conscious engagement with theory and method: much of that theory, as we shall see, was held in common with cultural studies. So, there was a convergence, and this book has to be understood in terms of that convergence: but also in terms of the ways in which history and cultural studies remained, and remain, separate.
