What books most inspired your radical imagination in 2018? History Workshop’s editors weigh in with an end-of-year roundup of their favourite reads.
Radical Books
Radical Irish Writers of the 1930s in the Archives
How can the forgotten archive of Irish-Jewish writer, Leslie Daiken, illuminate the radical networks and transnational solidarity of the Irish Left in the 1930s?
Remembering 1968: The S.C.U.M. Manifesto for the Society for Cutting up Men
Marybeth Hamilton on Valerie Solanas’ the SCUM Manifesto for the Society for Cutting up Men.
Radical Books: Maxim Gorky, ‘Song of the Falcon’ (1894)
For the latest post in our Radical Books series, Ole Birk Laursen tracks the influence of Maxim Gorky’s anti-Tsarist poem ‘Song of the Falcon’ on Russian and Indian revolutionaries before the Russian Revolution
Radical Books: Alexander Radishchev, ‘Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow’ (1790)
The ‘most notorious book in Russian history’: Jennifer Keating on Alexander Radishchev’s radical critique of autocracy, banned by Catherine the Great over a century before the Russian Revolution.
Radical Books: Gangrene (1959), with an introduction by Peter Benenson
US Army officer and historian Brian Drohan, on a Radical Book which exposed French atrocities during the Algerian War of Independence, was censored in France, and ultimately contributed to the establishment of Amnesty International
Radical Books: ‘Brighton Trans*formed’ (2014), E. J. Scott, Maeve Devine et al
Matt Cook, History Workshop Journal editor and professor of modern history at Birkbeck, on a moving collection of oral histories gathered from people living in the city of Brighton and Hove, who identify in various ways as trans.
