The year 2013 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of E. P. Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" (1963). Throughout the year, essays, articles, and conference panels--indeed, whole conferences--explored the legacy of this influential historian and his most monumental work. 2013, coincidentally, also marked the first time the author chose to assign Thompson's magnum opus to graduate students. In this article, the author shares his reflections on this decision. The author does so, both as a means of offering his own humble contribution to the year's larger assessment of Thompson's legacy, and as a way of suggesting why his book still remains relevant to historians of the twenty-first century. Despite being subjected to critiques from a number of different quarters over the past five decades, Thompson's "Making" continues to offer important lessons to the student of history. In particular, "Making's" relative strengths and weaknesses make it an ideal venue for exploring the question of professional conduct--for considering how historians ought to approach the peoples of the past who form the subjects of inquiries, and the implications these decisions have on both the scholarship produced individually and the wider historical literature as a whole.