Believed to have been taken in 1855, the year in which the Manchester Mechanics Institute moved to these smart new premises on Princes Street (then known as David Street), the photograph shown here is now held in the University of Manchester Library and is part of the John Rylands online images collection. Continue reading Manchester Mechanics Institute: birthplace of the TUC
The 2021 funding round for the Joint BME Events and Activities Small Grants scheme designed to support Black and Minority Ethnic history in the UK has now closed. Grants of up to £1,000 for available for eligible projects, and the deadline for applications was 12 November 2021. The scheme is administered by the Social History Society in partnership with the Society for the Study of … Continue reading Funding round for 2021 BME history projects now closed
Mick Ekers visits Norfolk Record Office to research the life in politics of Tom Higdon, one of the two teachers at the heart of the famous Burston School Strike which lasted from 1914 to 1939. The story of the Burston School Strike is quite well known. In 1914 Annie and Tom Higdon, two teachers in a village school in Norfolk, were sacked as a result … Continue reading Mick Ekers (Essex) on Burston strike school master Tom Higdon and labour activism between the wars
Titled ‘The new social order: work for all, art for all’, this powerful image was created by the socialist artist Walter Crane (1845-1915) for a leaflet for the so-called Ancoats Brotherhood – named for the district of Manchester in which they were based. The brotherhood had been founded in 1878 with the aim of bringing art and literature to the working class; it organised lectures, … Continue reading Walter Crane’s artistic vision of a new social order
of the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor from imprisonment in York Castle, in August 1841, where he had served 15 months for seditious libel Continue reading The O’Connor Liberation Medal: a way for Chartists to take their leader to their hearts
Book: Dissenting Traditions: Essays on Bryan D Palmer, Marxism, and History Continue reading Essays on Bryan D Palmer, Marxism, and History
Data on 38 million households from the 1921 census will be published early in the new year. Continue reading Why publication of the 1921 census will matter to labour historians
Irish and Jewish migrants in East London, their children and grandchildren provided fertile ground for the emergence of the mass unionisation of unskilled labour, says Dr Daniel Renshaw, author of Socialism and the Diasporic ‘Other’ Continue reading Solidarity and suspicion: Irish Catholic and Jewish radical politics in East London
On 13 February 1906 the Labour Group of MPs gathered on the terrace of the House of Commons for a photograph. That photograph would be turned into a postcard, a slightly battered copy of which appears here. Continue reading The Labour Group in the Commons: a postcard from February 1906
Edda Nicolson offers a reading list and guide to sources for labour historians interested in the topic and methodologies of emotions history Continue reading Labour History and the Emotions: a Bibliography
Society for the Study of Labour History 