Raphael Samuel is a scholar with his own characteristics among British Marxist historians. Just as E. P. Thompson, Raphael Samuel firstly served as a social historian, mainly conducting history research from the perspective of economy and society, then he transformed from a social historian to a new cultural historian, implementing history research, especially the history of lower mass people, from the angle of culture. His lifetime was devoted to democratizing and popularizing historiography, and the History Workshop Movement launched in his initiation is a movement of democratizing historiography, which exerted momentous influence in Britain. His academic thinking is also developed around the core of democratizing historiography. However, just when some British Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson and Hobsbawn became overwhelmingly famous among Chinese academic circle of world history, Raphael Samuel was scarcely mentioned, which is an important reason of my conducting research of Raphael Samuel.
This research paper consists of three parts. The first part is an exordium which is a brief account of Raphael Samuel's life story, the political and academic background in which he lived and a short introduction of present situation of Raphael Samuel's historical thinking study at home and abroad.
The second part is the main body, focusing on systematically introducing Raphael Samuel's historical thinking. This part is comprised of three chapters with each chapter subdivided into several sections. The main contents of this part are the followings.
Firstly, Raphael Samuel's thinking of popularizing historiography. By expounding memory and popular memory, Raphael Samuel advocated the importance of unofficial knowledge in history study, with his advocacy of unofficial knowledge, the monopoly of longstanding traditional political elite's history was undermined, and the attention was directed at those lower mass people whose history had not registered in the documents and statistics. Through regarding the mass people as the "invisible hands", he pushed those who work behind the curtain to the front stage and endowed them with honorable status in the study of history, which is indicative of that historiography is the cause of the general mass people and the historical achievement is the result of mass endeavor. Based on this he further proposed people's history and called on historians to study people's history. Finally, he put his proposition into practice, thus coming out of History Workshop Movement.
Secondly, the ontology of historiography. In this argumentation, Raphael Samuel enlarged the scope of historical resources, including visual image and myth into the category of historical resources, and posed suspicion on the authenticity of documents by pointing out the fictitious and artistic components of history. On such basis, he put forward the argument that history is hybrid, that is, history is the compounding of past and present, memory and myth, written records and oral traditions.
Thirdly, the survey of British national identity. Raphael Samuel's point was that nation and nationalism were all fictions, myths and imagination of communities. He reviewed ancient nations and the important factors of exciting national sentiment and brought to light the features of nations. Furthermore, after examining the idea of "four nations" history and British nationality, he pointed out that the unified British public identity were fading, the idea of "four nations" history was the objective reflection of this identity declining, the patriotism of British people was retreating, in place of which multiculturalism and the pursuit of private life and ordinariness were upsurging.
The third part is conclusion, in which the author tries to explore the methodology and its features of Raphael Samuel's history study. The author argues that Raphael Samuel's academic thinking was infused with the social, political and academic background in which he lived, it was the social and political life that provided him with materials, and his methods of research benefited from the transformation of historiography from economic-social history to new cultural history. In his research, he adopted a host of methods of new cultural historiography which greatly furnished his study of the history of lower mass people.
Keywords: Raphael Samuel；people's history；new cultural history；democratization of historiography