Annotated Bibliography

Following is an example of an annotated bibliography entry

Thompson, E. P. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past & Present, 50 (1971): 76-136. http://ezproxy.umgc.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.650244&site=eds-live&scope=site

E.P. Thompson’s 1971 article, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” is often referred to as a classic, and it transformed the historical discussion of mob and riot behavior. Thompson, who died in 1993, was a famous social and labor historian. Past & Present is the peer reviewed journal of the Past & Present Society, which was founded in 1952 as a scholarly society. The Past & Present Society’s editorial board are all professors or research fellows at prestigious academic institutions.

The author argues that eighteenth century riots about lack of access to food were not irrational, simplistic responses to deprivation. Rather, they were disciplined events launched under the shared cultural value of traditional rights, a value shared by the local and regional communities where food riots occurred as well as England as a whole. Thompson’s main points are that deprivation was indeed the cause of riots, but that the price gouging and trade practices that generally caused such deprivation were seen as unjust by most of English society. There was the perception of a consensus around what constituted a fair profit and what were the moral obligations of community members who controlled access to food through milling and markets. The fact that people felt supported by the population at large led them to take risks in rioting that they would not normally take.

Thompson’s evidence comes from eighteenth century tracts on trade practices, letters, government reports, legal proclamations, court records, and statistical evaluations. There does not appear to be much in the way of bias in the author’s goal to correct an imbalance in earlier historical approaches that portrayed popular uprisings about hunger as out of sync with their communities. The audience is scholarly, and the article is accurate.

Compared to my other sources, this article is decades older and was at the vanguard of its field in shifting the focus from those in power to regular people. This source is suitable for academic research because it is published in a peer reviewed scholarly journal.