Dig Where You Stand movement

The movement took its name and its founding spirit from Lindqvist's book Gräv där du står (Dig where you stand), published in 1978. In his emphasis on workers' researching their own history Lindqvist drew inspiration from Maxim Gorky, from public history campaigns in post-revolutionary China (where he studied for a year during the Great Leap Forward), from Kenneth Hudson's books and television shows on industrial archaeology in the 1960s, and from the British oral history movement. The motto was drawn from Friedrich Nietzsche: Wo du stehst, grab tief hinein! (Where you stand, dig deep!) The movement was the culmination of a variety of developments in Swedish cultural life in the 1970s such as the revival of documentarist fiction and the Bygd i förvandling ("Community in Change") local history campaign. The latter worked through books and a television series and built on the strong Swedish tradition of study circles by emphasising the training of study circle leaders. A successful trial in two regions in 1973 resulted in the creation of 700 study circles with 90,000 participants, and the program was extended across the country. It brought a large amount of oral and written reminiscences, photographs and documents to local museums and archives. Lindqvist's book was intended to provide a research manual for these activities, but also to bring a political perspective which the Bygd i förvandling campaign avoided. He put the focus on industrial history, and on the value of workers researching and writing the history of their companies, using their job expertise. "Factory history could and should be written from a fresh point of view -- by workers investigating their own workplaces." This would enable workers to challenge the authority of the bosses on the one hand and academic researchers on the other, and to claim the right to speak authoritatively about their work. For example, Lindqvist pointed to the worker deaths caused by exposure to asbestos dust in the cement industry, and the evidence that would be found in the bodies of the workers themselves contrasted with the profits still accruing to the owners long after the damage had been done. Philippe Bouguet has described it as a "small-scale Swedish 'cultural revolution'". ==Germany==

In the 1980s the History Movement (Geschichtsbewegung) took off in West Germany. It used "Dig where you stand" (Grabe wo du stehst) as its motto, and was directly influenced by the Swedish movement. An informal German translation of Lindqvist's book circulated in the movement until an official translation was published in 1989, and Lindqvist was invited to speak to history workshops. These workshops sprang up all over West Germany. By the mid-1980s the movement had grown to seventy local and regional workgroups; at one point Hamburg had 18 neighborhood workshops. In 1985 it was estimated that history workshop members were 40% academics, 20% unemployed, and the rest comprising teachers, the social professions, and the media. ==United Kingdom==

In the United Kingdom a similar movement had emerged in the 1960s, founded at Ruskin College, Oxford, by the Marxist historian Raphael Samuel. Although it had independent roots, the movement was directly influenced by the Swedish movement: an unauthorized English translation of Lindqvist's book circulated, which was never published. Ruskin College was a centre of adult education, and aligned easily with the Swedish study circles and German workshops. The British movement defined itself as interested in "history from below", and although it peaked in the mid-1970s, it had a lasting influence in promoting areas such as oral history and women's history. In 1976 it launched an influential scholarly journal, History Workshop Journal, which continues to be an outlet for research in "history from below". The movement also published research pamphlets on various topics. The "Dig Where You Stand" tradition and Lindqvist's book continued to act as an "inspirational framework" in the 2010s for a research program at University College London under Andrew Flinn. An English translation of Lindqvist's book was published in 2023 by Repeater Books. ==Canada==

• Écomusée de la maison du fier monde in Montréal published translation/adaptation of Lindqvist • working class history • decolonization == References ==