The disruption of a traditionally middle-class patriarchal space and the outrage provoked by attacks on artworks confirmed to suffragettes that the public and the press cared more for valuable objects than for women undergoing forcible feeding.
Grazia De Michele tells the radical history of the Cancer Sucks button, an antidote to the increasingly corporatised pink ribbon.
What does a Jacobite compass in Australia tell us about ‘treacherous objects’, nationalism, material culture, and diaspora today?
A photograph showing young men from the first class to enter Ruskin College, Oxford shows the social and political mix of students, and contains the seeds of disputes that would later appear among their ranks.
Vera Mackie on the paper crane, and its development from Japanese folk practice to a symbol of anti-nuclear activism.
Andrew Whitehead ponders the politics of a 1955 anarchist pamphlet which encouraged those going to the polls to ‘Vote for Joe Soap.’
John Marnell on MaThoko’s old post box, which played an important role as a key communication node for the nascent LGBT movement in South Africa during the 1980s and 1990s.
HWJ editor Jane Caplan looks back to 1945 to examine a very personal family object from the year of her birth, a year marked by changing politics in Britain as the Second World War came to an end.
Sarah Hiorns explains the forgotten histories behind her family’s written, typed, and laminated recipe for Cornish pasties.
Ulrike Wöhr Greenham unpacks this photo of Hiro Sumpter, and what it reveals about the politics of race and ethnicity at the Royal Air Force Greenham Common airbase in Berkshire, UK.
