For many of us in the UK, the recent election has turned this festive season into a bleak midwinter. What better time, then, to curl up with a good book: not to escape, but to explore new paths of resistance? Members of the History Workshop collective here recommend their recent favourite radical reads, from newly-published history to young adult fiction, with content that consoles, galvanises, inspires. Give us bread, but give us roses.
We asked History Workshop journal and online editors what books they have particularly enjoyed over the summer, and share their responses here to give you some inspiration in compiling your own reading lists, whether you have a last-minute break planned, or you want to stock up for the autumn (or spring, for our southern hemisphere friends!). Happy reading.
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.
Marybeth Hamilton on Valerie Solanas’ the SCUM Manifesto for the Society for Cutting up Men.
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
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.
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.
