How can we understand the current wave of strikes as part of a longer struggle around the value of care work? Emily Baughan reflects from the picket line.
With strikes happening in numerous sectors, Joseph O' Kane considers how people challenged government and employers over pay and working conditions in the past.
What can a dot in the Dorset landscape, marked by a simple chapel, tell us about the Tolpuddle Martyrs and their religious and political convictions? And how might this rare vernacular chapel be restored as a site of living history today?
Why did the British labour movement come to advocate state insurance at the turn of the 20th century? Maya Adereth examines transformations in worker benefit schemes through the lens of Friendly Societies.
How do century-old debates about the "servant problem" reverberate through today's political struggles around migration, labour, exploitation, and race? Maia Silber explores.
How might a verbose Victorian Parliamentary Report provide a source of radical rural Scottish history? Andy Drummond explores the unlikely story of the 1884 Napier Report.
Universities across the UK are taking part in the current UCU strike action over pay, pensions, and poor working conditions. On day 8 of the 10-day strike, three striking historians give us the view from picket lines across the country.
Why, since Brexit, have working class people in Britain come to be thought of as not just white but also male? Laura Schwartz suggests to understand this, we must look at history.
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.
In Dundee in the nineteenth century, Irish women employed in the city's jute mills pioneered a new activist organisation, the Irish Ladies Land League, fusing feminism, nationalism, and radical land reform. Niall Whelehan explores.
The "Sex Buyers' Bill" now pending in Parliament aims to protect women from exploitation by criminalizing men who buy sex, yet it is vehemently opposed by UK sex workers. Julia Laite explores the tangled history and woeful consequences of…
A speculative methodology can also be a deeply political response to the conventions of archival research, argues Sonja Boon in our Writing Radically series.
From a fragile piece of printed tissue, Martin Plaut uncovers the forgotten story of a massive demonstration on the eve of the First World War, protesting the brutal deportation from South Africa to Britain of nine trades union leaders who…
There are many stories of friendship during the miners’ strike. The importance of this was in part the sense – in the middle of extraordinary hostility from multiple directions – that they weren’t alone. The long-term, mutual and…
Lisa Edwards explores the troubled history of Slough Trading Estate, a site that acted as a short-lived central depot intended to repair vehicles deployed during the First World War and played a pioneering role in Britain's industrial…
First published in 1894 in Justice, Walter Crane’s The Workers’ Maypole declares ‘the cause of labour is the hope of the world’. Powerful yet whimsical, The Workers Maypole brings together English folk tradition and the demands of…
Epidemics are "moments of fluidity when parts of existing societies are laid bare as not fit for purpose". Looking at the history of the Black Death, Jane Whittle asks whether our current crisis could lead to new solutions to entrenched…
After many of the former steel manufacturing heartlands switched their political allegiances to the Conservatives in the General Election, Tosh Warwick asks what impact legacies of industrial decline, loss and uncertainty have had upon…
