During the heyday of the Historians' Group, from 1946 until 1956, notable members included Thompson, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel, as well as non-academics like A. L. Morton and Brian Pearce.
[1] In their work we can read two definite aims: This dualism was represented by Marx and Engels' dictum that "men make their own history, but they do not do so in conditions of their own choosing", which is regularly paraphrased in CPHG members' texts.
Revisiting and reinstating popular agency in the narrative of British history required originality and determination in the research process, to draw out marginal voices from texts in which they were barely mentioned or active.
Instead of this leading to loosening up of the system in the Eastern Bloc it helped trigger the Hungarian Uprising, the brutality of the Soviet invasion disgusted a great many party members who abandoned hope in peaceful reform.
Others stayed in the party, most notably Eric Hobsbawm, who remained in the group, which in 1956 launched a quarterly monograph series "Our History".