The European Labour History Network (ELHN) Labour & Empire Working Group is organising a series of seminars for 2022-2023. Seminars will be at 4pm UK time/5pm Central European time on Zoom. They will last one and a half hours, with up to 45 minutes of presentation and 45 minutes of Q&A. To receive the Zoom link of the events and for any information, please contact the group organisers at: … Continue reading Labour and Empire seminar series
Trade unions often depict the tools of their members’ trades in their emblems, badges, membership certificates and banners: foundry workers with their huge crucible of molten metal, weavers at the loom, and print compositors hard at work with great cases of metal type. But few unions have done so with quite the verve of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (Aslef). The membership … Continue reading Steaming ahead: trade union imagery that speaks of power and modernity
Mobbings, Struggles and Strikes: Episodes in the History of the Organised Working Class of Dumfries, 1771-1914, by Ian Gasse: the author, in association with the Scottish Labour History Society, 2022, pp. xvi + 400, h/b, £20 + £4p&p, ISBN 978 9163050 4 5 Class conflict in Dumfries so often centred on that most basic of staples, bread. From food riots in the 1770s during which … Continue reading Mobbings, struggles and strikes: reclaiming the working class history of Dumfries
The annual general meeting of the Society for the Study of Labour History will take place at the John Rylands Library, Manchester, at 12.15pm on Saturday 29 October. The AGM is open to SSLH members. If you would like to attend the meeting, please register your interest in advance by emailing: sslhmembership@gmail.com. Continue reading SSLH AGM 2022: register now
The Joint BME Small Grants Scheme is now closed for applications. The deadline for the current round of grants was 1 December 2022. The scheme provides small grants of up to £1,000 to support Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) historians working in the UK and/or on histories of BME people. Funding can be used to support directly incurred research costs and/or events and activities. We … Continue reading Funding round for 2022 BME history projects now closed
As the first of George Lansbury’s papers go online, Daniel Payne sets out how LSE Library is digitising its vast archive of material relating to the former Labour Party leader, and introduces some of the treasures it contains. Starting with the first two volumes, which are available online now, LSE Library recently announced plans to digitise its entire George Lansbury archive. An early supporter of … Continue reading Digitised and online: the papers of George Lansbury
Steven Parfitt reports from a conference at which he and other labour historians addressed issues of race and empire facing the seafarers’ union and outposts of the US Knights of Labor in Britain and elsewhere. Report on the Conference ‘Fragmented Powers: Confrontation and Cooperation in the English-speaking World’ From 23 to 25 June 2022, Yann Béliard, Joe Redmayne and I took part in the ‘Fragmented Powers’ conference, organised … Continue reading The fragmentation of labour over imperial and racial issues, 1870s-1920s
Alan Campbell and John McIlroy share headline findings from their research into the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain during the Comintern’s Third Period, 1928–1934. In a recent article for Labor History, we continue our extended prosopographical study of leading British Communists between the wars. It reports on a survey of the 66 members who served on the Central Committee (CC) of the … Continue reading Stalinism and ultra-leftism: a warning from history – the leadership of the CPGB, 1928-1934
When the Labour Party returned to power in 1929 to form its second minority government, the number of Labour women MPs doubled from four to nine. In this short newsreel, which would have been shown in cinemas all over the country, Margaret Bondfield introduces her colleagues – four of whom had been re-elected in the general election held on 30 May that year, and five … Continue reading Introducing Labour’s women MPs, 1929
Where do you cry in an open plan office? This is the emotional question lingering in the back of my thoughts as I complete research into commercial office interior spaces and the relationship of these spaces to the labour process. My research seeks to revisit the history of office spaces, considering and unpicking the relationship between the design of office interiors and the experience of … Continue reading Petra Seitz (UCL) looks at office design and asks: where do you cry in an open plan office?
Society for the Study of Labour History 