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Christopher Hill's History from Below

The radical life and work of the historian.

He once quipped that he had done a “brave and creditable” job training on a light machine gun for service in World War II, adding: “A thousand pities it was on somebody else’s target.” He also had a stammer, a source of his lifelong shyness and reserve, and described himself as “mean,” by which he meant “cheap.” (His use of pencils endlessly sharpened down to an inch or less was a family joke.) Hill taught the “Puritan Revolution” and showed how an “ancient constitution with common rights” long preceded the monarchy with its “Norman yoke.” He also raised funds for unemployed miners and cared for Basque orphans during the Spanish Civil War, a formative experience: “for 2 years or so,” he would later recall, “these kids really were my life.” Writing The World Turned Upside Down in dialogue with the transatlantic countercultural movement and freedom struggle of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Hill brought a message from the 17th century to the era’s young radicals: You think you invented the practice of free love, the opposition to imperialist war, the politics of feminism, and the notion of going back to the land?

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