Marlene Dietrich’s sultry sexuality is the best-remembered part of the 1930 film The Blue Angel, yet embedded in the film and its afterlife is a radical history of antifascist resistance. Marybeth Hamilton explores.
Radical Objects
Radical Objects: The London Women’s Handbook
What can The London Women’s Handbook reveal about the Greater London Council and radical feminist organising? Lucy Brownson explores the 1986 Handbook which captures a turning point in British political and social life.
Radical Objects: Josiah Wedgwood’s anti-slavery medallion
In the late eighteenth century Wedgwood’s medallion rallied people to the radical cause of abolition. Can it still inspire radical change today? Georgia Haseldine discusses the medallion’s historic radical power and re-making the medallion into an empowering object for the 21st century.
Radical Objects: An Anonymous Letter
What can the arrival of an anonymous letter to a local police station tell us about the administration of justice in nineteenth-century Scotland? Hannah Telling discusses the case surrounding the discovery of a woman’s body in 1853, and what this can tell us about male responses to sexual violence, both in the past and today.
Radical Objects: Eliza Sharples’ Letters to Thomas Cooper
Madeleine Goodall discusses the radical life of Eliza Sharples, whose letters to freethinking poet Thomas Cooper in the mid-19th century depict an idealistic figure struggling to survive.
Radical Objects: Anarchist Books
What does the history of anarchist books tell us about the diffusion of subversive ideas across national borders and long time spans? Anna Regener maps how state suppression has failed to prevent the ‘worlding’ of anarchist literature
Radical Object: Programme of the Evenings Musical Performances at Warrawang
What does an elegant, hand-written programme tell us about the harsh realities of emigration, and the colonisation of Australia in the nineteenth century? How does it exemplify the mindset of settlers, who assumed they needed to import their beliefs and culture including dance and music?
