Registration for Chartism Day is now open. The event is coming to the University of Reading for the first time in its twenty-nine year history, taking place on Saturday, 7 September, and is open to all. UPDATE: Chartism Day 2024 has now taken place. Read our report here. Professor Mike Sanders will deliver the keynote address on ‘Some passages in the Life of a (Tory) … Continue reading Chartism Day 2024: registration now open
Billed as ‘a day-long, co-productive community conversation, about Abolition, Birmingham, and Commemoration’, and convened and chaired by Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, Undoing 2007; Preparing for 2038 will take place on Saturday 1 June at The Exchange, 3 Centenary Square, Birmingham B1 2DR. The event takes as its starting point the ‘deception’ of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and of ‘the state-sponsored jingoistic jamboree … Continue reading Undoing 2007; Preparing for 2038: Abolition, Birmingham and Commemoration
This modern take on the Swing Riots of the 1830s raised eyebrows when Graham Moore performed it in Whitby Conservative Club, recalls Keith Laybourn. Captain SwingGraham Moore (Graham Moore, 1995) In folk clubs circles, Graham Moore’s name is synonymous with songs of protest. Some may know him as a leading folk singer of fifty years standing, some as a co-founder of the Tolpuddle Martyrs annual … Continue reading In tune: Captain Swing
Author: Sonny AngusThis is the abstract of an article published in Labour History Review (2023), 88, (2), 95-123. Read more. During the agitations around Chartism and each of the nineteenth century Reform Acts, radicals in Scotland turned out onto the streets in formal processions. They did so with a variety of vibrant materials, including flags, uniforms, costumes, and models. This article examines the purposes of, … Continue reading Material Cultures of Class in Scottish Radical Processions, 1832–1884
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…’
In 1839, the radical London Chartist George Julian Harney was out on bail awaiting trial for sedition. Two letters to his lawyer reveal his anxiety about the case and his desperate lack of cash. Mark Crail tells the story of Harney’s anxious summer. The letter shown here is filled with the angst of a man facing a possible gaol sentence and badly in need of … Continue reading The Chartist, his lawyer and a matter ‘of vital importance’
There can be few visitors to Tolpuddle over the past twenty years who have resisted the temptation to sit on the bench that forms part of sculptor Thompson Dagnall’s statue the ‘Tolpuddle Six’. Unveiled in 2002 and depicting an anguished George Loveless awaiting transportation to Australia, the work, carved from local Portland stone, has proved a popular addition to the small circuit of sites in … Continue reading Commemorating the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’: a trade union origin story in brick and stone
From the trade unionism of the 1830s to the Derry Lockout of 1924 and Labour’s housing record in the 1940s, this first issue of Labour History Review for 2022 has something for everyone Continue reading Labour History Review Volume 87 (2022), Issue 1
This article examines two of ‘the great [trades’] Unions of the North’, represented by John Douthwaite and the mythical ‘John Powlett’, during the ‘revolutionary era’ of general unionism Continue reading John Douthwaite and ‘John Powlett’: Trades’ Unionism and Conflict in Early 1830s Yorkshire
Society for the Study of Labour History 