How did Russian anarchism, Teesside socialism and Jewish phenomenology find a home in rural Essex? Ken Worpole delves into the fragile archive of an influential pacifist settlement at Frating Hall farm.
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,…
The international community is facing numerous migration crises, much like those that drove the development of international refugee rights and protections in the twentieth century. But instead of embracing and strengthening legal…
Gilbert & George's Underneath The Arches seems to stray from the certainty of a specific location and structure, allowing the experience of homelessness to be transfigured into a performance that evokes queer masculinity, the uncanny…
Book your tickets now for the Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture. This year, Yasmin Khan speaks on 'Women On The Frontline Of Empire': a feminist history of the Second World War - 7 March 2019 at Queen Mary University of London
Britain’s Brexit shambles owes much to historical mythologies about Britain’s role in the Second World War, shaped by imperial legacies. Robert Knight explores Joe Wright’s much praised film Darkest Hour as a prominent recent…
A moving first-hand account of the Siege of Leningrad from a civilian who lived through it, transcribed and introduced by his great nephew, Mikael Kai Zakharov.
In the context of the ongoing fallout of the Salisbury nerve attack, Ulf Schmidt & David Peace explore the troubling history of the British state's relationship with chemical weapons and secret science.
In 2017, three centuries of iron-making came to an end in Coalbrookdale, the birthplace of the industrial revolution. Now iron workers are writing their own history as the legacy of the foundry hangs in the balance.
Continuing our History Workshop World Cup series, Neil Carter tells the story of the English footballers caught up in the tensions of Nazi appeasement.
Martin Plaut, until recently the Africa Editor at BBC World Service News, tells the story of a remarkable cache of interviews with African soldiers in the Second World War, which has just been deposited with the Imperial War Museum
The story of the hundreds of Guernsey mothers and their infants who were evacuated from the island in advance of the German occupation between the 20th and 28th June 1940
The British Museum reading room opened in 1857 and was, until recently, the main reading room of the British Library. Phil Cohen gives a moving and at times very funny account of how his life as a (sometime) shoplifter, Situationist,…