Tag: 1920s

Labour history news

On the Line: PHM explores the 1926 General Strike

A major new People’s History Museum exhibition titled On the Line explores the General Strike, bringing together powerful images and objects from the past one hundred years and taking visitors to the ‘front line’, shining a light on how communities provided ‘lifelines’ and retracing ‘battle lines’ while asking the question, ‘Where is the line?’ Marking the centenary of the 1926 strike, the exhibition opens at … Continue reading On the Line: PHM explores the 1926 General Strike

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Labour History Review

Selling Solidarity: Interwar Dutch Leftist Negotiations over Anti-Colonial Solidarity

Author: Thomas van Gaalen and Thijs te BraakeThis is the abstract of an article published in Labour History Review (2025), 90, (3). Read this article. Centring Dutch leftist expressions of solidarity with two anti-colonial revolts – the 1926 Indonesian revolt and an attempted 1929 Curaçaoan revolution – this article examines how leftists in the European metropole sold solidarity with anti-colonialism across different political arenas and organizational levels. Relating their … Continue reading Selling Solidarity: Interwar Dutch Leftist Negotiations over Anti-Colonial Solidarity

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Labour History Review

The Spectre of Communism: Print Surveillance in the Working-Class Movement of Late Colonial Calcutta (1920–1947)

Author:  Manaswini SenThis is the abstract of an article published in Labour History Review (2025), 90, (3). Read this article. This paper examines how the empire’s hysteria against militant trade unionism and its anti-colonial essence lay at the root of the colonial state’s proliferation of surveillance apparatus in late colonial Bengal. It primarily focuses on how the state censored, proscribed, and surveilled the literary output of trade unionists and other … Continue reading The Spectre of Communism: Print Surveillance in the Working-Class Movement of Late Colonial Calcutta (1920–1947)

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Events

Call for papers: General Strike Exploration Day

Date – 9 May 2026Venue – People’s History MuseumAudience – Public audience and those with an interest in the working-class history, the labour movement and Manchester regional history May 2026 will mark the centenary of the General Strike when, for 9 days in May 1926, industrial production in Britain ground to a halt after trade unionists and workers tried unsuccessfully to force the government to … Continue reading Call for papers: General Strike Exploration Day

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Commentary

Cramlington: a place in labour history

In our continuing series on places in labour history, Quentin Outram recounts the story of the Northumberland miners who came to be known as the Cramlington train wreckers. This lonely stretch of the East Coast Main Line, nine miles north of Newcastle and still well over a hundred miles from Edinburgh, seems an unlikely site for history making. But during the 1926 General Strike it … Continue reading Cramlington: a place in labour history

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Commentary

Canklow meadows: a place in labour history

In our continuing series on places in labour history, Joe Stanley draws on his family’s history to recall the pit pony races that raised money and the morale of Rotherham miners during the 1926 general strike. In 1997, my great uncle Denis Stanley (1920-2011) published a history of his childhood in Brinsworth, Rotherham, in the Ivanhoe Review, a journal of local history in his home … Continue reading Canklow meadows: a place in labour history

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Books etc, SSLH news

Book launch: Clements Kadalie and the militant migrant workers of South Africa

In the 1920s, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU) emerged as a significant force in Southern Africa, organising as many as a quarter of a million workers throughout throughout South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho and Zimbabwe. Its general secretary, Clements Kadalie, was like many of those in the ICU leadership, himself a migrant, from Malawi. A famed orator, journalist and trade union organiser, … Continue reading Book launch: Clements Kadalie and the militant migrant workers of South Africa

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Bursary reports, Research bursaries

Gavin McCann on the libraries of the South Wales miners

Gavin McCann is researching a book on trade unions and education. Here he writes about his visit to the South Wales Miners’ Library in search of a lost culture of socialist education. ‘I was in a second-hand bookshop in Cambridge — it would have been 73-74 — and came across two volumes of the history of the mining industry. I thought, bloody hell, where has … Continue reading Gavin McCann on the libraries of the South Wales miners

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Events

CfP: The British General Strike of 1926: New Directions of Research

To commemorate the centenary of the British General Strike and miners’ lock-out, Newcastle University’s Labour & Society Research Group (LSRG) is organising a conference that revisits the historical experience of 1926 through the lens of new scholarship that is concerned with the global, spatial and maritime turns in labour history. Titled ‘The British General Strike of 1926: New Directions of Research’, the conference will take … Continue reading CfP: The British General Strike of 1926: New Directions of Research

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Labour history news, SSLH news

Marking the centenary of the General Strike

Next year marks one hundred years since the General Strike of 1926. The Society for the Study of Labour History is proud to be a part of a national partnership of fifteen museums, libraries and groups working together to commemorate the strike. Find out how you can support this partnership. This project is supported by: Beamish, the Living Museum of the North, Campaign for Trade … Continue reading Marking the centenary of the General Strike

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