What is friendship worth, how might it be valued, and could it count in the context of immigration control? How might valuing friendship contribute to a wider critique of ‘the family’? And how might an appreciation of intimacy,…
The opening stages of the French Revolution helped generate widespread enthusiasm for reform in Britain. It did so especially amongst a group of intellectual and literary women and men who contributed to the emerging ‘revolution…
Frank O'Hara insisted that poetry should be 'between two persons instead of two pages'. The enduring friendship between Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara reveals the ways in which it was possible to resist the post-war ideals of…
There are many stories of friendship during the miners’ strike. The importance of this was in part the sense – in the middle of extraordinary hostility from multiple directions – that they weren’t alone. The long-term, mutual and…
'It began with an email of simple praise. A senior scholar reached out to me about my academic writing. Her words were hospitable and soft; and, I responded. Now, almost a year later, we continue to write...' Celeste Henery on the radical…
This is the first in a series of pieces about Radical Friendship. The feature is intended as an exploration of different configurations of friendship, both intimate and symbolic, and the radical potential of these relationships.
Agnes Arnold-Forster, Caitjan Gainty & Lucas Canino
COVID-19 is not an equal opportunity disease. Even as politicians, managers, and UN officials give us pep talks about how we’re all in this together, segments of our society are having vastly different experiences of this pandemic.
With Italy on the frontline of Europe's Coronavirus outbreak, Rosa Salzberg examines how Renaissance Venice established world-leading measures to combat the plague, strategies we are still relying on today.
How can the history of the response to the 2009-10 swine flu epidemic illuminate the British government's response to the COVID crisis? Virginia Berridge explores.
What can the British provincial press tell us about the way pandemics have historically been experienced at a local level? Andrew Jackson proposes that such coverage offers vital insights into community-led responses to global public health…
In the second of a series on 'Radical History after Brexit', Charlotte Lydia Riley reflects on British exceptionalism, and asks how historians can work with it.
In our "Apocalypse Then and Now" feature, Kat Hill explores the sixteenth century world of German Anabaptism and asks what it means to believe that you are living through the End of the World.
In the first of a series on 'Radical History after Brexit', John Gallagher highlights how monolingualism is historically strange, and calls for a greater focus on multilingualism and language learning.
What value do the lessons of the past have in shaping strategies for managing the COVID-19 outbreak? In this article, Guillaume Lachenal and Gaëtan Thomas argue that an over-reliance on the allure of 'pandemic precedents' needs to be…
This piece is part of HWO's feature on ‘Apocalypse Then and Now’. The feature brings together radical reflections and historic perspectives on catastrophe and calamity. How have crises (both real and imagined), and responses to them,…
Matthew McCormack sets the UK government's response to Coronavirus in historic context, shedding some light on British responses to the Coronavirus pandemic, in contrast with the responses from other parts of the world.
The Coronavirus has brought chaos to global sport with major football matches played behind closed doors and postponements widespread across elite football, despite Government insistence that the show would go on.
…
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery holds hand-painted banners from the first political union in Britain founded in the 1820s, a plaque made from plaster scraped from the walls of Wormwood Scrubs by a First World War conscientious objector…
The latest in our Power in the Telling feature introduces 'MUTINY', a new documentary looking at the British Caribbean experience of the First World War and its legacies, as revealed by the last surviving veterans of the British West Indies…
How does writing a community-engaged history of the Rastafari in Britain challenge the white-dominated production of history and demand new methodologies? Aleema Gray explores her dual position, as an 'outsider from within': a Black…
The Young Historians Project (YHP) is a youth-driven initiative, centring young Black people in the production of Black history in Britain. Find out about their latest project, documenting the experiences of African women in the British…
Meleisa Ono-George introduces her new feature for HWO on community-engaged histories of Black Britain - "Power in the Telling" - which explores how history is not just about what is known, but also about the process and politics of its…
Thirty years ago, rave swept Britain, bringing a visceral sense of change. From film to dance, Peder Clark explores recent attempts to grapple with its legacies.
The Irish Civil War of 1922-3 was fought by Irish nationalists over whether or not to accept the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The treaty had been signed in December 1921, following the War of Independence (1919-1921). During this period in Irish…
For the first fifty years of Irish independence, domestic violence was shrouded in secrecy and denial. Cara Diver explores how feminist reformers shattered the illusion that the home was always a site of safety for women and their…
Tensions about the rights of native and foreign-born workers in Britain, and attempts to deal with them, are not new but have been the subject of public debate for centuries. Even during the later Middle Ages, the influx of alien workers…
Jessica Hinchy writes on how colonial officials sought to eliminate and 'fix' the gender identity of 'Hijras', who are often termed 'transgender', and the contemporary resonance of this process.
