History Workshop Podcast: Recent Episodes
History Workshop
The History Workshop Podcast explores the "history of the present" -- reflecting on the social forces that are changing our world, discussing new ideas and approaches to history, and talking with leading scholars, activists and writers about the histories and experiences that are often unknown and unseen. Welcome to our podcast channel.
What can we learn by turning a queer lens onto the study of medieval art? Three art historians discuss Spectrum of Desire, an exhibition at New York's Cloissters.
How can historians write with compassion and ethical clarity about issues of sexual violence? Ruth Beecher and Julie Wheelwright discuss their creative writing toolkit as a resource for tackling difficult subjects.
What can we learn about queer lives and queer history from the call logs of the UK's first LGBTQ+ helpline? Tash Walker and Adam Zmith on their award-winning podcast The Log Books.
What do the materials unearthed in the UK's Undercover Policing Inquiry reveal about the abuse of social justice activists by the surveillance state? Two core participants in the ongoing inquiry explore its history from the inside out.
What were the links between the History Workshop movement in Britain and radical history initiatives around the globe?
What is the value of history at times of global upheaval? Four historians discuss their reflections on this in History Workshop Journal's 100th issue.
How did History Workshop Journal's editorial collective sustain its commitment to radical history over fifty tumultuous years? Sally Alexander and Jeffrey Weeks discuss.
A new exhibition on 200 years of British trades union history spotlights surprising moments in the tumultuous history of workers organising for change.
Why has Eastern Europe been absent from studies of decolonial history? Historians Oksana Dudko and Anna Hájková discuss.
How might we reassess the importance of friendship as a transformative, even revolutionary, political resource?
How has paperwork served over time as a tool for empowerment and change? A roundtable of historians, archivists, and activists explore its unexpected radical history.
A Glasgow rock band, The Tenementals, explore what it means to create radical history in song.
Why did 155 nursery workers employed by London's Islington Council go on strike in 1984 - and why has their story been forgotten?
How can the visual arts shed light on the historical relationship between socialism and the natural world?
How might historians of the 2022 People's Uprising in Sri Lanka explore ongoing struggles for accountability and justice?
Exploring the enigma that was the Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali, author of the classic postcolonial novel Beer in the Snooker Club.
How did a 1911 East End police shootout affect the history of anarchism in London and beyond?
How did trans history find a foothold in the academy - and what is its future? Susan Stryker discusses with Claire Potter on this episode of the Why Now podcast.
What is the future of common spaces and community gathering spots in the UK? At a time when so many spaces that once were shared are now either derelict or in private hands, when it can be difficult to find somewhere to gather with friends without buying a latte in order to do so, how might the future be different? How might we rethink our relationship with public space, the land, and each other? Those are the questions that audio producer May Robson set out to answer in a new series for BBC Sounds Audio Lab called Now Here.
What possibilities do podcasts offer as vehicles for radical history? Albert Scharenberg of the Rosalux History podcast discusses.
How might we translate the French Revolution in ways that open it up to the 21st century?
A new collection of Raphael Samuel's essays illuminates 19th century Britain and the politics of "people's history".
What does the accidental death of an anarchist in London in 1894 tell us about forgotten histories of direct action?
What can two different stories of postcolonial archival practices tell us about memory, history-making, and decolonisation?
What can a single image of a lone female protestor tell us about the "Battle of Grosvenor Square" in 1968?
What can we learn from a 45-year-old Swedish manifesto that helped inspire the movement for workers' history?
The political climate greeting refugees to the UK is no longer simply hostile - it is expulsive. David Herd explores.
What lessons might the past hold for migrants seeking childcare in the UK but having No Recourse to Public Funds?
Who do you think of when you hear the phrase “revolutionary women”? If you cast your mind back to the movers and shakers of the revolutions that marked the 20th century, what women’s names come to mind? Sorcha Thomson and others discuss their book She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped the World.
Histories of gay men, lesbians, queer and trans people often focus on the heroic. But what about the gay characters whose impact on history was far more ambiguous, or complicated, or out-and-out bad? Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey, hosts of the Bad Gays podcast and authors of Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, discuss what those complicated lives can tell us about the dynamics of queer history and the formation of sexual identities.
What do we mean, in post-Brexit Britain, when we talk about "ordinary working-class places"? Valerie Wright, Ewan Gibbs, and Diarmaid Kelliher explore.
In September 2022, a group of public historians from outside and inside the academy met at London’s Birkbeck College in the heart of Bloomsbury to ask ‘What is public history now?’ In this special edition of the History Workshop Podcast, we explore the politics, the perils, and the possibilities of doing history in public.
What happens to narratives of British labour history when we incorporate stories of women? Laura Schwartz and George Stevenson explore.
To mark International Workers Day, we explore three forgotten moments in British history that spotlight the intertwined histories of labour and race.
Sixty years after breaking into a government bunker to expose secret state planning for nuclear conflict, Nic Ralph speaks for the first time about an extraordinary piece of direct action that genuinely worked.
What does it mean to write "intimate histories" of economic life? How might a focus on "the intimate" transform the way historians perceive and describe the economic past? Six scholars address those questions in this episode of the History Workshop podcast.
How can historians meaningfully and ethically research past experiences of sexual violence? What tools do they need to uncover a subject so intensely emotive and yet often accessible only through sources employing the dry legal or clinical language of institutions and bureaucracies? Ruth Beecher and Rhian Keyse discuss in conversation with Marybeth Hamilton in this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.
How might we understand the origins and the impact of current controversies raging in Britain over changing interpretations of British colonial history? How can those working on British colonial history intervene effectively in often fraught public debates? Corinne Fowler reflects on those questions in her June 2022 Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture.
Since the twentieth century, and perhaps even dating back further, the phrase 'black internationalism' has served as shorthand for a range of debates about Pan-Africanism and connections between various parts of the African Diaspora. The phrase has also been linked to other connected topics such as anti-Black racism, Black political activism, western colonisation of Africa and the Caribbean, anti-colonialism, and feminism, to name just a few. So how can we best define black internationalism? How might the concept illuminate the variegated historical forces shaping the experiences of people of African descent? Olivette Otele, who serves as Distinguished Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery at SOAS, University of London, explores those questions in conversation with History Workshop's Imaobong Umoren, in a wide-ranging discussion of the history of the concept of black internationalism, the foundations of black internationalist writing, and its future as a scholarly field and as a force for visionary political change.
Since the twentieth century, and perhaps even dating back further, the phrase 'black internationalism' has served as shorthand for a range of debates about Pan-Africanism and connections between various parts of the African Diaspora. The phrase has also been linked to other connected topics such as anti-Black racism, Black political activism, western colonisation of Africa and the Caribbean, anti-colonialism, and feminism, to name just a few. So how can we best define black internationalism? How might the concept illuminate the variegated historical forces shaping the experiences of people of African descent? Olivette Otele, who serves as Distinguished Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery at SOAS, University of London, explores those questions in conversation with History Workshop's Imaobong Umoren, in a wide-ranging discussion of the history of the concept of black internationalism, the foundations of black internationalist writing, and its future as a scholarly field and as a force for visionary political change.
The struggle for women's right to vote is often thought to have been waged on a national level. But how was this movement transnational? In what ways was international travel important to women's agitation for the vote? How did women move between nations and inspire and challenge each other? If they stayed local, what helped them to feel part of an international community? Historians James Keating and Summit Mukherjee discuss those questions in conversation with Rosa Campbell.
What is the history of activism against sexual violence? What kinds of strategies have survivors employed to combat it and to counter the stigma that has too often surrounded it? What kinds of narratives of resistance and protest have historically been given priority – and what voices have been left out? Today's guests are committed to examining those questions through their involvement with an interdisciplinary research project called SHAME - an acronym for Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters - which explores the links between sexual violence, medicine, and psychiatry.
How has the concept of "useful knowledge" shaped the two-hundred year history of Birkbeck College London - and workers education more generally? Joanna Bourke, Jonny Matfin, and Ciaran O'Donohue discuss with Marybeth Hamilton in this episode of the History Workshop podcast.
How can the stories of families illuminate the histories of migrations? Julia Laite and guests discuss in this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.
In this episode of the History Workshop Podcast, Elly Robson is in conversation with Professor Vinita Damodaran and Professor Harriet Ritvo to look at the ways that we know nature and how these have been political, in the past and today. Together, they discuss the rise of scientific expertise, its entanglement in projects of empire, and how it has interacted with indigenous and local knowledge. We also hear about whether solutions to climate change today can be left to scientists, what is meant by the Anthropocene, and about the politics of conservation.
Ridley Road has recently gained attention as the subject of a new BBC drama about the revival of fascism in 1960s London and the anti-fascist action taken by the Jewish community in East London.
Ridley Road Market has been around for almost 140 years and has been described as a “hub of connection, interconnections and social interaction”. Historically and today, the market is run by and for diverse communities and forms a public space which is political. Like many markets, however, Ridley Road is at risk from "regeneration", gentrification, and social cleansing.
In this episode by the audio producer May Robson, we hear local residents' memories of Ridley Road's anti-fascist history and about the struggles that market traders face today - from gentrification to lockdown.
Sheila Rowbotham is a writer, an historian, an activist, and an internationally renowned socialist feminist. In 1970 she participated in the first British Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College Oxford, and two years later she published Women, Resistance, and Revolution, a pathbreaking analysis of women’s participation in radical upheavals that was immediately translated into multiple languages and is now recognized as a feminist classic.
In 2000, she published a memoir, Promise of a Dream, which followed her first steps as a political radical and as an activist for women’s liberation over the course of the 1960s. She has now followed it with a second volume, Daring to Hope, a year-by-year exploration of her life in the 1970s, when she gained a global reputation as a writer and activist for whom women’s liberation and socialist revolution inextricably went hand in hand. In conversation with Marybeth Hamilton, she discusses the political challenges of feminist activism and the intimate challenges of navigating a life devoted to transformation, in which the personal was understood to be political.
How can black feminism lead to our collective liberation? Today we hear from the Black feminist writers, thinkers and activists Stella Dadzie and Chardine Taylor Stone, who join Rosa Campbell to discuss internationalism, the importance of collectivity, the role history might play in achieving justice and hope in difficult times.
Listen now on Soundcloud - Apple Podcasts - Spotify - Stitcher - or wherever you get your podcasts.
How has the writing of Black British histories functioned as both a form of historical analysis and a voice of radical oppositional politics? Caroline Bressey, Meleisa Ono-George, and Sadiah Qureshi discuss with Marybeth Hamilton in this episode of the History Workshop podcast.
How can the power and invention of Forum Theatre inform radical histories of oppressed groups, such as the homeless? To mark World Homelessness Day on 10 October, Peter Jones speaks with Adrian Jackson, founder of Cardboard Citizens, a theatre company working with homeless people, on the latest episode of the History Workshop Podcast.
What are we doing when we research and tell stories of families, whether other peoples' families or our own? Julia Laite and guests discuss in this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.
What are transnational solidarities and how do they expand our understanding of interactions beyond the nation state? Do they offer a way to understand how actors beyond the West engage with and shape global transformations? Lydia Walker and Su Lin Lewis discuss with Ria Kapoor in this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.
Hazel Carby’s book Imperial Intimacies: a Tale of Two Islands uses the lens of her own family history to make a deep dive into the workings of patriarchal, racialized, and gendered power. She draws on that book for this year’s Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture, titled "Imperial Sexual Economies." Her lecture forms this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.
In 1910, a sixteen year old New Zealander named Lydia Harvey boarded a steamship bound for Buenos Aires in the company of a husband and wife who promised her a life of glamor and ease. What resulted was a journey into the world of commercial sex that took her from South America to London, where she turned the tables on her traffickers and became a star witness in their criminal trial. Up until now, that witness testimony constituted Lydia Harvey’s lone moment in the historical spotlight. In the sweeping historical dramas of migration, crime, and sexual commerce, she was, at most, a bit player, who steps fleetingly out of the shadows, speaks her two or three lines, and then disappears.
In her new book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, the historian Julia Laite places Harvey’s story centre stage. The book that results is a riveting narrative history that puts complex human faces on stories too often told through stock characters: histories of prostitution, of policing, of criminal justice and moral panics. It also is a meditation on the politics of storytelling and the ethics of historical “rescue”, of historians’ efforts to give voice to the voiceless and to spotlight the neglected and obscure.
In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, Julia Laite discusses her book with Marybeth Hamilton.
Listen now on Soundcloud - Apple Podcasts - Spotify - Stitcher - or wherever you get your podcasts.
How can we write the history of AIDS activism so that all stories are equally important? In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, Sarah Schulman discusses how she navigated that challenge in her new book Let The Record Show: a Political History of ACT-UP New York.
How can historians best document, preserve, and make accessible the voices and artifacts of refugee and migration experience? What kinds of materials would such a collection involve? How can archives respond, ethically and practically, to the challenge of conserving materials from under-represented communities whose lives remain so politicized and whose experiences raise such thorny issues of nationalism, immigration, identity and belonging? In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, Ria Kapoor speaks to four historians and archivists who are grappling with those questions: Paul Dudman; Heather Faulkner; Mezna Qato, and Peter Gatrell.
How do we write the history of women’s lives when history itself has hidden them? In this International Women’s Day episode of the History Workshop Podcast, Christopher Kissane speaks to the Irish poet and writer Doireann ní Ghríofa about her book 'A Ghost in the Throat', winner of the An Post Irish National Book of the Year and the Foyle’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year. The book weaves together the stories of two women, separated by centuries: Doireann’s experiences as a young mother in twenty-first century Ireland, and the lost life of the poet Eibhlín Dubh ní Chonaill, whose lament for her murdered husband, Caoineadh Airt uí Laoghaire, has been described as the greatest Irish poem of the eighteenth-century. Finding Eibhlín Dubh’s story repeatedly obscured by her famous male relatives and an ‘academic gaze [that swiftly] places her in a masculine shadow, as though she could only be of interest as a satellite to male lives’, Doireann searches for the poet’s life with ‘the brazen audacity of one positioned far from the tall walls of the university’. Through research and imagination, between dropping her children to school and putting them to bed, she constructs a very different history. ‘This’, the book begins, ‘is a female text’.
In this episode on queer education, Elly Robson is joined by Syeda Ali and Nazmia Jamal to discuss how queer lives can be integrated into school curricula and cultures. The history of queer education in the UK has often been one of deliberate silence: a silence that was officially legislated between 1988 and 2003 by Section 28, which made it illegal for schools to 'promote homosexuality'. We explore stories of resistance and trace Section 28's legacies, including what lessons it might hold for teachers seeking to challenge the Islamophobic Prevent strategy today.
To find out more about resources referenced in this podcast, check out - Nazmia Jamal's new LGBT+ poetry resource for the Poetry Society: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/education/learning-from-home/secondary-14-poets-for-lgbt-history-month-and-always/ - the Rebel Dykes documentary: https://www.rebeldykes1980s.com/ - the letter to the Independent in September 2019, titled "The government is hijacking LGBT+ sex education to bolster its counterterrorism strategy": https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/lgbt-no-outsiders-rse-birmingham-muslim-prevent-values-a9092781.html
In episode three of our four-part series on Queer Activisms, Laura Forster is joined by Ajamu X and E-J Scott to discuss public history, the queer archive, and what it means to queer the museum. Listen now to the conversation on the History Workshop Podcast.
In this four-part podcast series on Queer Activisms, historians, performers, educators and activists take a deep dive into existence and resistance in queer life – past and present. In our second episode, Marybeth Hamilton is joined by Matt Cook and Debra Levine to discuss AIDS, queer activism, and the politics of loss and grief.
In this four-part series on Queer Activisms, historians, performers, educators and activists take a deep dive into existence and resistance in queer life - past and present.
In this episode on Queer Joy, Laura Forster is joined by Shay Shay, Tim Other and Dr Fiona Anderson. Together, these artists, activists and historians talk about performance and community, and how they relate to about precarity, gentrification and dispossession. Ranging from 1970s New York to Ru Paul's Drag Race, this episode considers where queer creativity is forged in the margins and asks how we can take up space.
Introduced by Marybeth Hamilton | Audio Production: May Robson
Are we living in an Age of Walls? Talk of walls is of course all around us, from heated political rhetoric about building a wall on America’s southernmost border to more amorphous references to the walls of our psyches or firewalls blocking the flow of digital data. In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, HWO's Laura Forster talks to historian Paul Betts, author of Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic.
How might museum exhibitions convey the complex dynamics of black British history? In this episode of the History Workshop Podcast, co-curators Melissa Bennett (Museum of London) and Iyamide Thomas (Historical Researcher for The Krios Dot Com) discuss their work on "The Krios of Sierra Leone," a new display at the Museum of London Docklands that tells the story of Sierra Leone’s Krio people. In the process they have a broader conversation about Black British history in museums and community-engaged museum practice. Subscribe and listen now on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
How might historical research into past abuse serve the ends of restorative justice? What kinds of challenges do historians face in gathering testimonies of traumatic experience? Katherine O’Donnell and Claire McGettrick are scholars, activists, and members of Justice for Magdalenes Research, an organization dedicated to unearthing the histories of the women and girls who passed through Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. Over the past decade they have worked tirelessly to gather survivors’ testimonies, to educate the public about the abuses endured, and to support survivors’ campaigns for redress. They discuss their work in this episode of the History Workshop podcast.
Subscribe and listen now on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
Can the migrant detention centres employed by the Trump administration on the US/Mexico border be legitimately labelled “concentration camps”? What is a concentration camp? In what circumstances are the use of the phrase legitimate, and when does it obscure more than it reveals? Historian Dan Stone explores those questions in this episode of the History Workshop podcast.
Subscribe and listen now on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
How was our understanding of sexuality in history transformed by the liberation movements of the late twentieth century and by the challenge of the AIDS epidemic? The historian and activist Jeffrey Weeks explores those questions in the latest episode of the History Workshop podcast. Subscribe and listen now on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
What is the role of populism in shaping resistance to Trump and Trumpism? Who are the new progressive leaders emerging from the American grassroots, and what are their historical antecedents? D D Guttenplan - who covered the 2016 presidential election for The Nation - explores these questions in the latest episode of the History Workshop Podcast.
Subscribe and listen now on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
How was violence essential to sustaining the British Empire, and why is teaching this imperative in today's world? Historian Kim Wagner, author of Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre, discusses this question in conversation with Aditya Ramesh on the latest episode History Workshop Podcast. Subscribe and listen now on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
For more information and episode notes, visit History Workshop Online: http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/s2-e5-the-violence-of-empire/.
Imperial soldiers played a significant and increasingly well acknowledged part in the Second World War, but what about the women of the British empire? What stories might global and feminist histories of the Second World War reveal?
Listen to Professor Yasmin Khan deliver the Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture 2019, "Women On The Frontline Of Empire: a feminist history of the Second World War".
For episode notes and more information, visit: http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/women-on-frontline-of-empire/.
It’s 200 years since the Peterloo Massacre, in which peaceful protesters for democratic reform in Manchester were attacked by cavalry, with 18 killed and over 600 injured. Ballads were crucial tools in the reporting and commemoration of Peterloo, cementing its place in working-class and radical history.
In this episode, we hear Kate Gibson talk to ballad experts - Dr Alison Morgan, Brian Peters and Peter Coe - about the radical history of Peterloo and its ballads.
You can listen to, subscribe and like the History Workshop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and other podcasting platforms.
For more information and episode notes, visit: http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/ballads-of-peterloo/.
As students take to the streets to demand action on climate change, listen to activists and historians discuss solutions to environmental crisis at both global and local levels.
This conversation took place in April 2018 as part of History Acts, a forum encouraging the exchange of ideas and experiences between radical historians and contemporary activists. For more information about History Acts, please visit www.historyacts.org.
Episode notes and more information can be found at http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/history-acts-environment/.
As the UK Labour Party charts a new direction under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, activists and historians discuss the history and future of the Left in government.
This conversation took place in January 2018 as part of History Acts, a forum encouraging the exchange of ideas and experiences between radical historians and contemporary activists. For more information about History Acts, please visit www.historyacts.org.
Episode notes and more information can be found at http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/the-left-in-government/.
What happens when you set out to turn family history into historical fiction? For novelist Emma Darwin, who spent seven years trying to fictionalize her insanely eminent ancestors, the result was a creative disaster, an epic struggle with notions of historical truth that she has chronicled in a memoir, This is Not A Book About Charles Darwin.
Listen now on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
Episode notes and more information can be found at http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/historical-fiction-emma-darwin/.
What can history tell us about the politics of monetary innovations like cryptocurrencies? Do the poor benefit from inclusion in the dominant monetary system, or would they fare better devising their own means of exchange? Rebecca Spang looks back to the era of the French Revolution to explore the power dynamics of decentralized currencies. Listen now, and subscribe to the History Workshop Podcast on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher.
In a walking tour consisting of ten ten-minute episodes, we explore the streets of Marx's London, the sites where Karl Marx lived and worked in his 34 years in Britain's capital. Guided by the historian Thomas Jones, we track Marx's life and times from Leicester Street to Highgate Cemetery, and in the process - 200 years on from his birth - we reflect on the continuing resonance of his ideas. Listen now, and subscribe to the History Workshop podcast on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
In a walking tour consisting of ten ten-minute episodes, we explore the streets of Marx's London, the sites where Karl Marx lived and worked in his 34 years in Britain's capital. Guided by the historian Thomas Jones, we track Marx's life and times from Leicester Street to Highgate Cemetery, and in the process - 200 years on from his birth - we reflect on the continuing resonance of his ideas. Listen now, and subscribe to the History Workshop podcast on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
In a walking tour consisting of ten ten-minute episodes, we explore the streets of Marx's London, the sites where Karl Marx lived and worked in his 34 years in Britain's capital. Guided by the historian Thomas Jones, we track Marx's life and times from Leicester Street to Highgate Cemetery, and in the process - 200 years on from his birth - we reflect on the continuing resonance of his ideas. Listen now, and subscribe to the History Workshop podcast on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
In a walking tour consisting of ten ten-minute episodes, we explore the streets of Marx's London, the sites where Karl Marx lived and worked in his 34 years in Britain's capital. Guided by the historian Thomas Jones, we track Marx's life and times from Leicester Street to Highgate Cemetery, and in the process - 200 years on from his birth - we reflect on the continuing resonance of his ideas. Listen now, and subscribe to the History Workshop podcast on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
In a walking tour consisting of ten ten-minute episodes, we explore the streets of Marx's London, the sites where Karl Marx lived and worked in his 34 years in Britain's capital. Guided by the historian Thomas Jones, we track Marx's life and times from Leicester Street to Highgate Cemetery, and in the process - 200 years on from his birth - we reflect on the continuing resonance of his ideas. Listen now, and subscribe to the History Workshop podcast on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
In a walking tour consisting of ten ten-minute episodes, we explore the streets of Marx's London, the sites where Karl Marx lived and worked in his 34 years in Britain's capital. Guided by the historian Thomas Jones, we track Marx's life and times from Leicester Street to Highgate Cemetery, and in the process - 200 years on from his birth - we reflect on the continuing resonance of his ideas. Listen now, and subscribe to the History Workshop podcast on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
In a walking tour consisting of ten ten-minute episodes, we explore the streets of Marx's London, the sites where Karl Marx lived and worked in his 34 years in Britain's capital. Guided by the historian Thomas Jones, we track Marx's life and times from Leicester Street to Highgate Cemetery, and in the process - 200 years on from his birth - we reflect on the continuing resonance of his ideas. Listen now, and subscribe to the History Workshop podcast on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
In a walking tour consisting of ten ten-minute episodes, we explore the streets of Marx's London, the sites where Karl Marx lived and worked in his 34 years in Britain's capital. Guided by the historian Thomas Jones, we track Marx's life and times from Leicester Street to Highgate Cemetery, and in the process - 200 years on from his birth - we reflect on the continuing resonance of his ideas. Listen now, and subscribe to the History Workshop podcast on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
In a walking tour consisting of ten ten-minute episodes, we explore the streets of Marx's London, the sites where Karl Marx lived and worked in his 34 years in Britain's capital. Guided by the historian Thomas Jones, we track Marx's life and times from Leicester Street to Highgate Cemetery, and in the process - 200 years on from his birth - we reflect on the continuing resonance of his ideas. Listen now, and subscribe to the History Workshop podcast on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
In a walking tour consisting of ten ten-minute episodes, we explore the streets of Marx's London, the sites where Karl Marx lived and worked in his 34 years in Britain's capital. Guided by the historian Thomas Jones, we track Marx's life and times from Leicester Street to Highgate Cemetery, and in the process - 200 years on from his birth - we reflect on the continuing resonance of his ideas. Listen now, and subscribe to the History Workshop podcast on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
In this episode, Marybeth Hamilton speaks to Alice Echols, author of the ground-breaking book Daring to Be Bad, about the rise and fall of radical feminism in the pivotal year of 1968. How did demands for the liberation of women emerge from the tumult of radical protest? What tensions and conflicts did the early movement contain? How do its demands and its methods resonate fifty years later? Echols reflects: "What people don't understand about the late 1960s, and what they don't understand about the women's movement, is that there is a very different logic at work, and it is not a logic of intersectionality. It is a logical of organizing around your own oppression. Anything else is seen as liberal. And liberal is understood as compromised, tainted, and to be avoided." Listen now, and subscribe to the History Workshop Podcast on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher.
In this episode, the first in a series, we turn to historic passions: the strong and sometimes obsessive pull of curiosity about the past. Over the next few months, we'll be speaking to people who have made that curiosity their life's work - within the historical profession or beyond.
Nell Irvin Painter is uniquely qualified to reflect on the possibilities beyond professional history. After an esteemed career as an historian of race and identity, she retired from her professorship at Princeton and, at age 64, enrolled at art school. Over the last decade she has reinvented herself as a visual artist, her work now held in collections across the US. We talk to her about history, art, imagination, politics, and the limits and possibilities of historical truth. (Photo credit: John Emerson)
In the first part of this two-part episode, we speak with Professor Richard Drayton (King's College, London) and ask him to put white supremacy in historical perspective. What are the long term intellectual, social and political roots of white supremacy in Britain and the Americas? How has white supremacy factored in the political coalition that supports Donald Trump, and in the anti-immigrant sentiment that led to Brexit? What are the stories and cultural trends we need to know in order to understand how white supremacy operates in Anglo-American culture? Drayton offers historical context and explanation for these questions and more. Listen now, and subscribe to the History Workshop Podcast on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher.
In this episode, we have recordings from a recent session of History Acts – a new radical history forum that works as gathering place for historians and activists. Their goal is to bring radical historians and contemporary activists together to find new ways for academics to engage with contemporary struggles, to learn from activists, and to see what expertise and institutional resources historians can use to provide active solidarity.
In this podcast you will hear key excerpts from 'History Acts 05 – Homes for All', featuring Eva and Millie from the Hackney Digs(a private renter support and campaign group), Professor Jerry White (Birkbeck) and Dr Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (UCL).
For more information about History Acts, visit www.historyacts.org
In this episode of the History Workshop Podcast, a unique perspective on the memoir and biography, and the art of writing about lived experiences. Alison Light tells a very personal story about her ongoing efforts to write a memoir about her relationship with Raphael Samuel, who passed away in 1996. She uses their marriage as a kind of a lens through which to see both their shared past and her future. She also reflects on our ideas of ‘personal life’ – suggesting instead that the public sphere cannot be separated from private experience, especially in the process of writing a memoir. As we share more and more of our lives online, this is something we are all increasingly familiar with.
The first episode of the History Workshop Podcast. In this episode, six scholars in the early stages of their careers gather to discuss a big problem plaguing higher education: precarious working conditions for university lecturers and teachers. It's an issue that impacts thousands across the UK... if these conditions are left as they are, the quality of education in universities can only diminish, and we could be denied promising scholarship from a new generation of experts.
Listen to Laura Schwartz, Harry Stopes, Rob Waters, Alva Traebert and Jack Saunders in conversation with History Workshop Online editor, Hannah Elias.
Recorded at the Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism conference at Queen Mary University of London.