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
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.
Radical Books: ‘An Agreement of the People’ (1647)
Debated in the 1647 Putney Debates, in the wake of the first English Civil War, the ‘Agreement of the People’ proposed radical democratic, legal and religious reforms; most significantly a written constitution between the people and their representatives.
Radical Books: ‘I Know my Own Heart: The Diary of Anne Lister’, ed. Helena Whitbread (Virago, 1988)
Anne Lister’s diaries, detailing her love affairs with women, weren’t published until 1988, centuries after her death. In the latest post for the new Radical Books series, Laura Gowing examines how ‘I Know My Own Heart’ transformed the recovery of lesbian histories.
Radical Books: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
The Wretched of the Earth was the final work of Frantz Fanon, a fearless critic of colonialism and a key figure in Algeria’s struggle for independence. This new history of the ‘Third World’ depicted the unresolved and open-ended nature of the struggle for liberation.
Radical Books: The Luther Bible of 1534
In 1534, Martin Luther combined radical theology with revolutionary technology to publish the first vernacular translation of the Old and New Testament. It was a seminal moment in development of the Protestant Reformation, print culture, and the German language.
