What can tools - for cutting, sharpening or carrying - tell us about the nature of work in the past? Paul Warde on how the skills that tools embodied can nuance narratives of modernity and productivity.
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?
What is the difference between poverty and scarcity? Julia McClure explores how different communities and societies mitigated the risks of resource scarcity before capitalism created poverty.
What can the biography of William Mcllroy, a gay humanist from post-war Northern Ireland, tell us about the negotiation of non-conforming identities in the face of inflexible religious conservatism? Charlie Lynch investigates the…
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.
Joe Moran reflects on his trip to scatter his father's ashes on Scattery, a tiny island off west Clare, Ireland, and in the process explores its resonances for histories of family, migration, and the power of small places.
As the global ecological crisis deepens and spreads through virus, fire and flood, Elly Robson introduces a new HWO series on The Political Environment. How have politics shaped the way we identify ecological problems and solutions, and how…
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.
How can the lives of those historically labelled as vagrants be humanised? Nick Crowson explores creative and archival methods for moving past a fixed point of prosecution, and towards visibility across time and place.
The sixteenth-century struggle to balance biological and economic well-being implicated a surprising number of authorities, but not everyone accepted their discipline. Matthew Vester explores in Pandemic Politics During the Renaissance.
The radical historian Alun Howkins was a founder editor of History Workshop, a singer and historian of folk music, and a chronicler of the land and its people. Becky Taylor explores his work and his legacy.
An exploration of the plaster casts of the first labouring man to enter Parliament, and founder of the National Agricultural Labourer’s Union, Joseph Arch, written by Karen Sayer
