Here for the fist time is the story of one of history's great scholarly and marital collaborations. J. L. and Barbara Hammond were among the most innovative and influential historians of the twentieth century. Between 1911 and 1934, they wrote eight books together that amount, in effect, to the first sustained social history of modern England.

Three of their books in particular - The Village Labourer (1911), The Town Labourer (1917), and The Skilled Labourer (1919) - not only anticipated what came to be known as "history from below," but also permanently changed the way most people think about the Industrial Revolution, which they defined in the apocalyptic terms to which we have become accustomed.

The Hammonds were also public figures prominently involved, along with L. T. Hobhouse. J. A. Hobson, C. P. Scott, and others, in the definition and dissemination of "the new liberalism." From the point of involvement in the politics of one century, they helped give enduring historical shape to another, and thus exercise, like their friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb, a dual fascination.

The Hammonds is part dual-biography, part evocation of an age, but it is also a study of marriage, a marriage at a particular moment in history, a marriage in the art and craft of history.