This article brings together six talented women historians in twentieth-century England whose scholarly productions helped shape modern historical practice but who are little known in the canonical accounts of history-writing in the period. The author is looking to map and describe historical communities from a grounded and qualitative perspective…

Joan Simon (née Peel, 1915-2005) was the life-long partner of Brian Simon who helped launch FORUM in September 1958. Like Brian, she embraced a Communist outlook and engagement in the area of education. Unlike Brian, she practiced the historian's craft outside the male academic hierarchy. Based on newly available personal papers this study…

A conference to honour the memory of Brian Simon (1915-2002) was a privilege and a challenge for its organizing committee. Simon was an educationist and an activist, a chronicler and a critic. His intellectual field encompassed psychology, pedagogy and politics as well as history. His legacy was both to education and to its history. Any…