David Goodway is a British historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 and a respected international authority on anarchism

Anarchism

Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...

 and libertarian socialism

Libertarian socialism

Libertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic, stateless society without private property in the means of production...

. A student of Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm , CH, FBA, is a British Marxist historian, public intellectual, and author...

, Goodway specialised in the history of Chartism

Chartism

Chartism was a movement for political and social reform in the United Kingdom during the mid-19th century, between 1838 and 1859. It takes its name from the People's Charter of 1838. Chartism was possibly the first mass working class labour movement in the world...

 in London and his work London Chartism is an acknowledged classic work on the subject. He has also written widely about writers in the British left libertarian tradition, such as William Morris

William Morris

William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...

, John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys

-Biography:Powys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, in 1872, the son of the Reverend Charles Francis Powys , who was vicar of Montacute, Somerset for thirty-two years, and Mary Cowper Johnson, a descendent of the poet William Cowper. He came from a family of eleven children, many of whom were also...

, Alex Comfort

Alex Comfort

Alexander Comfort, MB BChir, PhD, DSc was a medical professional, gerontologist, anarchist, pacifist, conscientious objector and writer, best known for The Joy of Sex, which played a part in what is often called the sexual revolution...

, Herbert Read

Herbert Read

Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC was an English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner....

, Colin Ward

Colin Ward

Colin Ward was a British anarchist writer. He has been called "one of the greatest anarchist thinkers of the past half century, and a pioneering social historian." -Life:...

 and Maurice Brinton

Maurice Brinton

Maurice Brinton was the pen name under which Christopher Agamemnon Pallis wrote and translated for the British libertarian socialist group Solidarity from 1960 until the early 1980s....

.

Selected publications

• London Chartism 1838-1848 (1982)
• For anarchism : history, theory, and practice (editor) (1989)
• Against power and death : the anarchist articles and pamphlets of Alex Comfort (editor)(1994)
• A one-man manifesto and other writings for Freedom Press by Herbert Read (editor) (1994)
• Herbert Read reassessed (editor) (1998)
• Talking anarchy (with Colin Ward
  Colin Ward
  Colin Ward was a British anarchist writer. He has been called "one of the greatest anarchist thinkers of the past half century, and a pioneering social historian." -Life:...
  
  ) (2003)
• For workers' power: the selected writings of Maurice Brinton (editor) (2004)
• John Cowper Powys, The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant and Other Essays (editor) (2006)
• Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (2006)
• The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Emma Goldman (editor) (2007)

External links

• David Goodway's homepage