Reading of social and educational history documents through the lens of the Marxist Interpretation

Kumar, Arun

Abstract

This document case study will study how historians analyse archival source material that relates to social, economic and education history. In this particular case, we will look at a nineteenth-century pamphlet written by a British parliamentarian on poverty alleviation, labour, and industrial training during the Victorian era. We will study this document from a Marxist perspective, particularly from the social history approach and the social reproduction of class. Through a detailed analysis of the pamphlet, key themes of Marxist analysis such as class relations, the capitalist mode of production and education, poverty and inequality, industrialization and labour will be touched upon.

This study will also demonstrate the use of the primary source in understanding class relations and dynamics of a society. It will discuss the pamphlet to chart out how the upper-class viewed and evaluated the lower class in the nineteenth century, and how poverty and the poor came to be understood through the lens of the privileged classes. We will also discuss the limitations of such elite sources in doing history-writing and knowing about the past. Professional historians use elite sources with great caution because such sources hide alternative perspectives as much as they reveal their perspectives.

Citation

Kumar, A. (2021). Reading of social and educational history documents through the lens of the Marxist Interpretation

• Other Type: Manual / Guide
• Acceptance Date: Jun 30, 2021
• Publication Date: 2021
• Deposit Date: Sep 2, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 4, 2024
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/39163791