User:Workgate

I am a 59 yr old male retired history teacher residing in the UK. I graduated in history and I have had a lifelong fascination with the subject, from the theory of the "big bang" which started an interest in cosmology and quantum physics, to the evolution of homo sapiens and the earth (geology) through the first civilizations to the present day. My degree concentrated on the 19th and 20th centuries and through further reading and teaching I consider these fields to be my speciality. Being brought up in a working class family, I have an extensive knowledge of 60s popular culture which I was very much immersed in at the time. I also have extensive knowledge of the British and American "punk" movements of the 70s, and their garage band forerunners of the 60s. I am a musician and played in groups in the late 60s and joined a number of punk groups in the late 70s-early 80s. I also studied Marx, Freud, Weber and Durkheim, and to a lesser extent, anarchism. I started a literature degree but dropped out halfway through. But this triggered an interest in modernist literature and 19th century novels, which contain a lot of historical information, particularly the incredibly rigid and cruel class system, which survives in a diluted form today.