We have a new page on the website setting out the collections in the South Wales Miners’ Library and how these can be accessed. The library holds collections relevant to the social and cultural histories of industrial South Wales. Key periods covered by the collection include the Spanish Civil War, the nationalisation of coal and the 1984-5 strike. Holdings on these subjects span various resources, … Continue reading Inside the South Wales Miners’ Library
Seventeen volumes of papers, photographs and other records collected by the former Labour Party leader George Lansbury and his biographer and son-in-law Raymond Postgate have now been digitized and made available online by the LSE Library. This vast archive, which covers the period 1877 to 1955 (from when Lansbury turned eighteen until sometime after his death in 1940 at the age of eighty-one), includes both … Continue reading George Lansbury archives are now online
With the National Union of Mineworkers’ archive now transferred to the Modern Records Centre, work is under way to catalogue this vast collection and decide how it can best be made available to researchers and mining communities. Mark Crail reports on the story so far. On a chilly morning in January 2023, a lorry drew up outside the Modern Records Centre at the University of … Continue reading Inside the NUM archive: 150 years of coal mining history
Every year the SSLH-Archives and Resources Committee publishes a guide to new labour history accessions in UK archives for the previous twelve months. The latest guide, for 2023, has now been published and can be freely downloaded below. Among the largest new additions to the archives this year is a collection of 100 boxes of material on political songs, including songsheets, vinyl records, journals and … Continue reading Additions to labour history archive collections 2023
We are delighted to have been able to add a page to our Archives and Resources Committee listings for the University of Nottingham. The university’s Manuscripts and Special Collections include collections from the Institute for Workers’ Control, the Feminist Archive (East Midlands), the Nottingham Clarion Choir, Nottingham and District Trades Union Council, and the papers of individual activists including Ken Coates MEP, Fred Westacott, and … Continue reading University of Nottingham special collections
Evan Smith offers a guide to the growing volume of left, labour and radical history resources now online, and introduces the directory of more than 500 collections to be found on his New Historical Express blog. Digitisation is a major part of archival practice and historical research today. While it is not a substitute for archival research and only a small percentage of archival material … Continue reading Don’t Mourn, Digitise! Building a list of radical online archives
The archive of Arthur Scargill, activist and former President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1982-2002, has found a new home at the University of Sheffield Library Special Collections, Heritage and Archives. The Arthur Scargill Archive covers his life, from the day he started work at the age of 15 at Woolley Colliery in the North Barnsley area; his time in the Young … Continue reading University of Sheffield acquires Arthur Scargill archive
What started as a personal collection of labour movement papers has grown into a substantial archive for local, national and international working-class history. Now it has found a home and work is under way to catalogue its contents, writes Peter Higgins. The Birmingham People’s History Archive (BPHA) has been a project long in the planning stage. When Paul Cooper, the archive’s creator, was a student … Continue reading Birmingham People’s History Archive finds a home
The chance discovery of a cache of microfilms enabled the TUC Library to digitise its card index and make a century’s worth of cards covering the publications in its collection available online to all, as Jeff Howarth explains. The TUC Library was founded one hundred years ago, in 1922, with the amalgamation of the TUC Parliamentary Committee, the Labour Party Information Bureau, and the Women’s … Continue reading How the TUC Library card index went online in its centenary year
The People’s Flag… is in need of a little care, writes Mike Sanders. Banners and flags have played a key role in Labour movement since its inception. Trades unions and political protesters alike have marched behind banners proclaiming their objectives and values using both word and image. Nor has their symbolic importance escaped the attention of those opposed to the Labour movement. At Peterloo, the … Continue reading SSLH backs drive to conserve historic Belgian trade union banners
Society for the Study of Labour History 