THE TERM “people’s history” entered into historians’ use in 1966 with E. P. Thompson’s “History from Below,” published in the Times Literary Supplement . Though “people’s history” or “history from below” had both likely been used since the ’30s, Thompson’s work popularized it — inasmuch as a Times Literary Supplement piece can popularize something. This style of historiography subverted the tradition of viewing working people as the passive receptors of historical change — instead, they became actors of their own worth, whose resistance, aspirations, and articulated visions of the future made them active participants in the creation of society today. But Thompson’s work retains the problems of its era: it mixed condescension and glorification of the working man — emphasis on man — and made no real reference to people of color, women, LGBTQ folks. Perhaps most troubling, though, is how the newly minted histories from below assumed, at least among historians, that to take this perspecti...