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Edward Palmer Thompson (February 3, 1924 - August 28, 1993), is an English historian, socialist and peace campaigner. I am probably best known today for my historical work on the British radical movements in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, in particular my book The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Whigs and Hunters (1977), Albions Fatal Tree (1975), Customs in Common (1991)and The Poverty of Theory (1978). However, I also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and a prolific journalist and essayist as well as publishing one novel and a collection of poetry.I was one of the main intellectual members of the Communist Party who left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and I played a Key Role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s and 1960s. I support ordinary people and their behaviours above ultra leftists whose idealistic politics never actually happens.I am a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964-70 and 1974-79, and during the 1980s I was the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.My most influential work was and remains The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963 while I was working at the University of Leeds. It told the forgotten history of the first working class left in the world in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. In my preface to this book, I set out my approach to writing history from below:"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'Utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties".A major work of research and synthesis, it was also important in historiographical terms: with it, I demonstrated the power of an historical Marxism rooted in the experience of real flesh-and-blood workers. It remains on university reading lists over 40 years after its publication.I wrote the book whilst living in Siddal, Halifax, West Yorkshire and based some of the work on my experiences with local folk.The last book I finished was Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (1993). The product of years of research and published shortly after my death, it shows convincingly how far Blake was inspired by dissident religious ideas rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English civil war.However, the most lasting significant work was the compendium "Customs in Common" (1991), where I talk about the theoretical basis of Trans historical humanistic resistance - illustrating this with the historical experience of Reclaiming the Streets with rough music, the importance of food riots, and the power of self created cultural resistance from below.