From its foundation until his move to Manchester, Manning served on the editorial board of the journal Past & Present, which had been set up in 1952, largely by the Communist Party Historians Group, to elaborate "history from below" – the past as the story of generations of workers and peasants, women and men, struggling to make themselves and their world.
[1] Manning's work drew largely on the Thomason collection of pamphlets held in the British Library and on Royalist propaganda about the social origins of their opponents in the English Civil War.
The rise of 'revisionist' historiography in the 1970s with its dismissal of Marxist approaches was a development he deplored, but which he was unable to overturn.
Manning nevertheless remained prominent as a vigorous Marxist polemicist and political activist until the end of his life.
[2] He was later a supporter of the London Socialist Historians Group, which now holds an annual memorial lecture in his honour.