News and information about the Society for the Study of Labour History and its activities.
The July 2023 issue of our members’ newsletter is out now. If you are a member of the Society for the Study of Labour History, you will have received this in a PDF document by email. You can also download it from the Members’ Resources page here on the website. The newsletter is not sent to non-members, who are, instead, invited to join us. Continue reading SSLH members’ newsletter, July 2023
This year’s Chartism Day was in Sheffield, with papers on the land plan, the poet Thomas Cooper, the ‘paper pantheon’, Chartism’s first historian of the modern era, and the lives of Chartists in France Held on Saturday 17 June, Chartism Day 2023 opened with a fitting tribute to Stephen Roberts – the organiser of the first such event in 1995, and a leading Chartist historian … Continue reading Chartism Day 2023 report: ‘You tyrants of England! Your race may soon be run…’
A television drama that tells the extraordinary story of the Cragg Vale Coiners is now on BBC iPlayer. And you may just spot a familiar face in the cast. Even by the standards of the day, life in the Pennines weaving communities of Cragg Vale in the second half of the eighteenth century could be tough. But in the 1760s, this isolated valley, close to … Continue reading The Gallows Pole: how a community of weavers nearly crashed the economy
The April 2023 issue of our members’ newsletter is out now. If you are a member of the Society for the Study of Labour History, you will have received this in a PDF document by email. You can also download it from the Members’ Resources page here on the website. The newsletter is not sent to non-members, who are, instead, invited to join us. Continue reading SSLH members’ newsletter April 2023
Congratulations to this year’s successful applicants to the BME small grants funding scheme. 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. The successful projects from the 2022 round are: The scheme is administered by the Social History Society in partnership with the Economic History Society, History … Continue reading BME small grants scheme backs six projects
On 21 May 1838 an estimated 150,000 people assembled on Glasgow Green for a mass demonstration. There they witnessed the launch of the People’s Charter, a list of demands for political reform. The changes they called for included voting by secret ballot, equal-sized constituencies and, most importantly, that all men should have the vote. The Chartist were the first national mass working-class movement. In the … Continue reading In Our Time: Chartism
The first issue of our new members’ newsletter is out now. If you are a member of the Society for the Study of Labour History, you will have received this in a PDF document by email. You can also download it from the Members’ Resources page here on the website. The newsletter is not sent to non-members, who are, instead, invited to join us. Continue reading SSLH members’ newsletter out now
Above: Mike Mecham presents Meirian Jump of the Marx Memorial Library with a copy of Left Lives in Twentieth-Century Ireland, Vol. 3: Communist Lives, edited by Francis Devine and Patrick Smylie (Umiskin Press, Dublin, April 2020). An inscription in the book reads, ‘Presented by Umiskin Press, Dublin, to the Marx Memorial Library in recognition of its major contribution to the preservation and enhancement of Socialist … Continue reading Communist lives in twentieth century Ireland
The first annual John Halstead Memorial Lecture in memory and in honour of a labour historian who served the Society for the Study of Labour History for six decades took place in the splendid Gothic Revival surroundings of the John Rylands Library on Saturday 29 October. The full video can be viewed below. More than sixty people were present in person or online to hear … Continue reading Big Jim Larkin: reflections on the identity, politics and legacy of a socialist and trade union leader
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
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