How should historians respond to acts of violence in the official archive? Catherine Phipps considers the life of Samia, an Algerian-French teenager, arguing that the epistemic attacks she faced highlight the urgency of historical work which takes account of police violence against sex workers.
On the 7th May 2020, at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, news broke that this year’s Notting Hill Carnival would be cancelled. Set to take place this August Bank Holiday weekend, the cancellation was a first in the Carnival’s more than fifty-year history. A few weeks […]
The Black Report, a landmark critique of health inequalities that barely discussed ‘race’, turns forty today. Grace Redhead and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn investigate the legacy of the report for the age of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.
Barbara Taylor review’s Tessa McWatt’s ‘Shame On Me: an anatomy of race and belonging’. Her review considers the discovery and rediscovery of friends, and how important this process is in order to understand disparities of power and privilege that so often go unspoken or willfully unnoticed.
Analogies to the Second World War are a recurring theme in modern British history. The seeming orthodoxy in Britain in 2020 is that the nation is at war, on a scale not known since the Second World War. The enemy, this time the coronavirus, is invisible to the naked eye.
The last fortnight has seen many statues associated with racism and colonialism torn down. When were they originally put up, and what can that tell about the history of whiteness and empire? Peter Hill explores.
When, how, and why did skin colour matter in early modern Europe? Hannah Murphy explores how science could make the known strange.
