The year 2026 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of History Workshop Journal. Established by a collective of activist editors, the journal was dedicated to democratising the practice of history, in the belief that “history is too important to be left to professional historians alone”. Since then, from its self-published beginnings, HWJ has become one of the world’s leading academic journals, while retaining its commitment to the radical power of the historical imagination to illuminate present-day struggles and agitate for change.
In this episode, recorded as part of our series celebrating the publication of HWJ’s 100th issue, HW editorial fellows Beckie Rutherford and Vivien Chan sat down with two veterans of the earliest days of the journal: Sally Alexander, a founding editor who remains actively involved in the editorial collective, and Jeffrey Weeks, who published an article in the journal’s first issue and spent fifteen years on the editorial collective after joining in 1979. Together they explore the personal and political commitments that have driven HWJ since its beginnings, and what it means to work collectively in times of political upheaval and crisis.
