History Workshop was a popular movement for the democratisation of History which flourished in Britain from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s (with sporadic activity continuing into the 1990s). It emerged from Ruskin College Oxford where Raphael Samuel, the movement’s initiator and presiding spirit, taught history for many decades. In the course of the 1970s History Workshop spread across Britain, spawning dozens of regional and local initiatives, publishing many books, pamphlets and journals (including the still-extant History Workshop Journal), and acquiring influence throughout intellectual and educational circles. During these years the movement also went international, spawning sister workshops in Germany, France, Italy, South Africa and America. Its high point was reached in the late 1970s, and thereafter it went into a slow decline, although many of the developments it helped to foster (such as oral history and women’s history) continue to flourish today.

Raphael Samuel's lasting memorials will be the work he inspired in the generations of students he taught at Ruskin College, Oxford, from 1962 to 1996, and History Workshop, in its protean forms of annual conferences, local networks and federations - which spread across Europe and Scandinavia - and its eponymous journal. A loose coalition of worker-historians and full-time socialist researchers was what he called it.

Samuel gave new meaning to the idea of history as an experimental art, inventing the History Workshop (a term he borrowed from one of his heroines, Joan Littlewood, founder of Theatre Workshop) first as a local and then as an international movement. The extent of his empathy was exceptional. No one charted more exactly the ways in which the Industrial Revolution had increased the extent of toil in every branch of Victorian industry, but no one could have acknowledged more generously the contribution of Tory antiquaries in Early Hanoverian England to the writing of national history. His cast of historical actors ranged from Catholic priests ministering among the post-famine Irish poor, the proletarian Gladstonian roughs of Headington Quarry through South Wales village Bolsheviks in the 1920, to the mobsters of the Edwardian East End underworld.

Raphael Samuel was one of the most prominent historians in the country to support history from below ­ the attempt to actively recover the history of ordinary people and their movements. In many ways this was a step forward from the sometimes rather rigid orthodoxies of more mechanical Marxist histories. It fed in directly, too, to the resurgence of socialist ideas after 1968 and to the birth of the women's movement in which the History Workshop Conference of November 1968 played a central organising role.