‘All Knees and Elbows’ is an ongoing project started in 2007 by Tom Roberts and Anthony Iles. We are building a critical picture of the making and writing of ‘people’s history’ / ‘history from below’.

In 1946 a group consisting of E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and Dona Torr among others formed the Communist Party Historians Group. Their aim was to draw out forms of agency that had been hidden by traditional approaches to history. Along with Raphael Samuel, C.L.R. James and Peter Linebaugh we take this loose grouping as the starting point for the making and study of history as a contested field in which ‘the below’ plays an active role.

The project started out as a pamphlet weaving extracts together with our own critical commentaries.

The first edition of the pamphlet from 2007 is available to download here.

We are currently putting together an extended and revised version of the pamphlet, exploring the relevance of ‘history from below’ in making sense of current events internationally. We also aim to question the status, uses and abuses of this historiographical legacy in the present.

The new edition will be published by Strickland Distribution, Glasgow in early 2012 and will include an extended bibliographical resource in both printed and online form.