Image by Manny Becerra.

My journey into the realm of people’s history began during my teenage years when I first read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. This initial exposure sparked my curiosity about how history is constructed, and it led me to delve deeper into historiography—particularly the evolution of people’s history as an intellectual movement. Over the years, I encountered a wide range of historians, from Michel Foucault and Marc Bloch to Lucien Febvre and Chris Harman, each offering unique perspectives on the study of ordinary people in history.

However, it wasn’t until I immersed myself in the work of Antonio Gramsci that I discovered a more universal, less provincial, and Western-centric approach to history. Although Gramsci did not explicitly position himself as a historian of the people, his ideas on organic intellectuals and cultural hegemony have provided invaluable tools for understanding how ordinary people can shape history. Gramsci’s theories have brought a more relatable and applicable understanding of Marxism, particularly by liberating it from the confines of rigid economic theories.

The Contribution of Linda Tuhiwai Smith

A significant turning point in my intellectual journey came with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s ‘Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples’. Her work further deepened my understanding of how to approach history from a decolonial perspective. Smith’s methodology allowed me to, once again, revisit and reconsider Palestinian history, challenging the orientalist and elitist perspectives that have long distorted the narrative. It also opened my eyes to a lingering issue within indigenous history: many of us, as indigenous historians, unknowingly replicate the very methodologies used by Western historians to portray us as the ‘other.’

Smith’s work fundamentally challenges the traditional view that history is written by the victor.

“It is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them........

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