Histories of the Present

Since it began in the 1960s, the History Workshop movement has sought to make history relevant to contemporary politics. We continue this project through these Histories of the Present.

What

Where

When

Series

Census Lessons

Helen Sunderland

To mark Census Day 2021, Helen Sunderland looks back to 1911 when the state mobilised schoolchildren to help number the nation, tracing a history of contradictory attitudes to children’s citizenship that persist today.

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Ghetto Streets

Ariana Ellis

What was it like to live in the Roman Ghetto under the shadow of papal authority? Using historical maps and personal testimony, Ariana Ellis recounts the story of Anna del Monte, a young Jewish woman who was subject to forcible removal and…

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Activist Streets

Daniel Frost

How did Black activist organisations fight racism in the London suburbs? Daniel Frost finds that they did so – in districts like Croydon and Thornton Heath – through association and alliance with the struggles of inner-city locales.

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Pedestrian Streets

Mariana Mogilevich

How did 1970s New York become a laboratory for a grand experiment in 'returning streets to the people'? Mariana Mogilevich argues that street life and politics in Midtown Manhattan became central to the inception of a new form pedestrian…

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Black Wall Street

Hannibal B. Johnson

How do we build healing history in the wake of a massacre? Hannibal B. Johnson writes about black achievement in Tulsa, Oklahoma and celebrates the architects of the “Greenwood District” who resisted white supremacy and racial…

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Women’s Streets

Tiina Männistö-Funk

How do we see walking women? Using archival photography from 1950s and 1960s Turku (Finland), Tiina Männistö-Funk argues that women's care and bodily presence shapes cities as much as concrete and asphalt do.

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Whose Streets?

Peter Jones

This opening article in the 'Whose Streets?' feature considers what it means to live through the jarring collapse of public life in the midst of a pandemic and how this moment might stimulate new radical histories of the urban commons.

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