Christopher Hill's History from Below

Books & the Arts / A World Turned Upside Down Christopher Hill’s history from below. Christopher Hill’s Revolutions The radical life and work of the historian. Illustration by Joe Ciardiello. This article appears in the June 2025 issue. Christopher Hill was one of the most prolific and influential historians of the 20th century. He was also the product of two specific eras of political and social change: the Old Left’s communist and working-class movements of the 1930s and ’40s, and the New Left’s liberation and countercultural movements of the 1960s and ’70s. At the end of the former, in 1940, Hill wrote The English Revolution 1640, which provided a class analysis of the bourgeois revolution against feudalism and charted a lifetime of scholarship ahead. In the middle of the latter, in 1972, Hill published another book on the same period, his most profound and lasting work, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. A social and intellectual history ... Read full article.