The Making of a Social Historian
Harold Perkin is one of the pioneers of modern social history. This is his "rags to riches", or rather "slums to suburbs", story, combined with the rise of social history as the most popular aspect of that burgeoning media discipline. Born at the poorer end of an extended family that stretched from poor potters to the owners of thirteen factories, he rose by a talent for passing exams, winning prizes, and sheer good luck, to become the first titular professor of social history in Britain. On the way he became the leading lady in the Cambridge Footlights, an apprentice journalist, an RAF officer, a trade union leader and negotiator of university salaries (with Margaret Thatcher), a television presenter, founder of the Social History...
