Category: Books etc

The SSLH publishes the book series Studies in Labour History in association with Liverpool University Press. We also publish book reviews in our journal, the Labour History Review.

The articles below draw attention to new books, reports, pamphlets, and online publications and projects of interest to labour historians.

Books etc, SSLH news

Tom Paine’s graphic life story to be told anew with the support of the SSLH

“Independence is my happiness, the world is my country and my religion is to do good,” declared Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man. Yet by the end of his life, the Norfolk-born radical had been exiled from Britain, narrowly escaped the guillotine in revolutionary France, and was widely shunned in his adopted homeland by his former comrades-in-arms in the struggle for American independence. Paine … Continue reading Tom Paine’s graphic life story to be told anew with the support of the SSLH

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‘The town that bought itself’

One hundred years ago this month, the West Yorkshire town of Huddersfield effectively “bought itself” when its corporation paid £1.3m for the Ramsden estate, which included the whole of the town centre and over half of the land within the Borough boundary. Now, marking the centenary of the event, Huddersfield Local History Society has brought together a series of original essays on the Ramsden family’s role in … Continue reading ‘The town that bought itself’

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Essays on Chartism in Huddersfield

The Charter, Our Right! Huddersfield Chartism Re-consideredEdited by John A. Hargreaves, featuring essays by Alan Brooke, Matthew Roberts, Malcolm Chase and John Halstead.Published by the Huddersfield Local History Society. “The Huddersfield district lay at the centre of many of the social and political protest and reform movements of the first half of the nineteenth century – Luddism, the war of the unstamped press, the ten-hours … Continue reading Essays on Chartism in Huddersfield

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Workers’ playtime

The General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU) has published a collection of plays inspired by the trade union movement. Volume One features work by playwrights, directors and theatre companies that do not enjoy a large public profile, due to their basis in working-class communities: ‘They have been the anonymous writing about the anonymous – yet this is often the great strength of their work.’ This … Continue reading Workers’ playtime

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Grunwick: the workers’ story

Commemorating 40 years since the beginning of the Grunwick Dispute, this seminal text examines the intersection of trade unions, race and the law during one of the most defining events for unions of the twentieth century. The Grunwick Dispute fundamentally changed the way trade unions operated, and brought migrant labour concerns to the fore. This second edition of Jack Dromey and Graham Taylor’s work is … Continue reading Grunwick: the workers’ story

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Conversations with Radical Women

Northern ReSisters: Conversations with Radical Womenby Bernadette Hyland Publication date 1 May 2015Published by the Mary Quaile Club ISBN 987-0-9932247-0-6 £5.95 In the first part of this book Bernadette speaks to nine women from Greater Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds who have been active in radical movements over the past forty years, including trade unionism, Ireland Women’s Liberation, radical bookselling, anti-racism and the peace movement. Bernadette says: “In … Continue reading Conversations with Radical Women

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Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider

The book offers an original perspective on the significance of both racism and anti-racism in the making of the English working class across two centuries. While racism became a powerful structuring force within this social class from as early as the mid-Victorian period, this book also traces the episodic emergence of currents of working class anti-racism. Through an insistence that race is central to the … Continue reading Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider

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Before the Windrush

Long before the arrival of the ‘Empire Windrush’ after the Second World War, Liverpool was widely known for its polyglot population, its boisterous ‘sailortown’ and cosmopolitan profile of transients, sojourners and settlers. Regarding Britain as the mother country, ‘coloured’ colonials arrived in Liverpool for what they thought to be internal migration into a common British world. What they encountered, however, was very different. Their legal … Continue reading Before the Windrush

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Class, Culture and Community

Class, Culture and Communities is derived from a recent SSLH conference and includes articles by Anne Baldwin, Chris Ellis, Stephen Etheridge, Neil Pye, Alexander Jackson, Laura Price, Catriona Louise MacDonald, Brian Marren, Christopher Massey, Chris Hill and Maria Novella Vitucci. The collection includes articles on mining identities, brass bands in the Pennines, ethnicity, unemployment, women councillors, nationalisation, the Labour defence debate of the 1950s and 1960s, the Independent … Continue reading Class, Culture and Community

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Liberty or Death: the Yorkshire Luddites

The story of the Luddites and their times continues to fascinate. That is particularly true for those of us who live in that part of Yorkshire where the events were most dramatic. However, what is often overlooked is the extent to which the Luddite events of 1812 and 1813 fit within the broader and more sustained pattern of British social and political radicalism in the … Continue reading Liberty or Death: the Yorkshire Luddites

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