The 100 best nonfiction books: No 19 - The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)

This influential, painstakingly compiled masterpiece reads as an anatomy of preindustrial Britain - and a description of the lost experience of the common man "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'utopian' artisan... from the enormous condescension of posterity." With these stirring words, a virtually unknown provincial historian launched a revolution in social and cultural history that would influence the minds and attitudes of a...