Why did the British labour movement come to advocate state insurance at the turn of the 20th century? Maya Adereth examines transformations in worker benefit schemes through the lens of Friendly Societies.
What is the difference between poverty and scarcity? Julia McClure explores how different communities and societies mitigated the risks of resource scarcity before capitalism created poverty.
How did enslaved women calculate risks when petitioning for their freedom in colonial Mexico? Amos Megged explores the complex life story of María de la Candelaria, arguing that enslaved women sought restitution of their rights, and…
What did seventeenth century communities do when one of their number reported experiencing suicidal thoughts? Imogen Knox discusses the ways in which early modern people sought to help and care for their family members and neighbours in…
How did women escape domestic abuse in late medieval London? Charlotte Berry explores how women navigated the social and economic barriers to leaving a violent marriage to find a safe place to live in a medieval city.
How did young couples negotiate sexual activity and its reproductive consequences in Old Regime France? Julie Hardwick discusses the real and perceived risks and uncertainties of courtship, arguing that communities ultimately sought to…
Newspaper advertisements for enslaved boys who escaped into early modern London reveal very little about the freedom seekers, and rather more about those who enslaved them. But what can we learn of Cuffee, who risked everything to escape in…
Conceptions of risk and uncertainty are traditionally applied to moments of environmental and economic crisis, both real and imagined. This new HWO series seeks to understand how ordinary people calculated perceived and real risks and…
What politically contested narratives lie beyond the East End proper? Jason Finch returns to his ancestral roots in Newham, making the case that spatial literary analysis can shed light on outer London's conflictual past.
What was it like to live in the Roman Ghetto under the shadow of papal authority? Using historical maps and personal testimony, Ariana Ellis recounts the story of Anna del Monte, a young Jewish woman who was subject to forcible removal and…
How did Black activist organisations fight racism in the London suburbs? Daniel Frost finds that they did so – in districts like Croydon and Thornton Heath – through association and alliance with the struggles of inner-city locales.
How did the civic spaces of Sheffield animate new forms of working-class protest and procession? Katrina Navickas argues that public space became an instrument of democratic struggle and a means for building unity amongst Chartist groups.
How did 1970s New York become a laboratory for a grand experiment in 'returning streets to the people'? Mariana Mogilevich argues that street life and politics in Midtown Manhattan became central to the inception of a new form pedestrian…
How do we see walking women? Using archival photography from 1950s and 1960s Turku (Finland), Tiina Männistö-Funk argues that women's care and bodily presence shapes cities as much as concrete and asphalt do.
This opening article in the 'Whose Streets?' feature considers what it means to live through the jarring collapse of public life in the midst of a pandemic and how this moment might stimulate new radical histories of the urban commons.
Warrane, which the British called Sydney, was invaded in 1788. Rosalind Carr shows how just as polite male gallantry in the eighteenth century enabled men to enact assumed gender superiority, in a colonial context friendship and civility…
Writing History in a Drought Year.
"I want very much to write history that matters. But it should only matter for a little while:"
Editorial Fellow @menysnoweballes brings our #WritingRadically series to a close.
In commissioning this feature, editorial fellow Rachel Moss asked contributors: how can we radically re-imagine the writing of history? Over the next few weeks, our contributors reply with creative new methods, sources and forms that they…
The gatekeepers of history have tended to take few risks. Julia Laite argues for a less certain, more quantum kind of history in the latest in our #WritingRadically series.
What challenges do we face in narrating living memory as history, asks Helen Kingstone, and how can oral history challenge linear stories and foster intergenerational generational exchange.
A speculative methodology can also be a deeply political response to the conventions of archival research, argues Sonja Boon in our Writing Radically series.
"You don’t know what you had until you lost it": at a time when few of us can travel far, Catherine Fletcher asks what role travel plays in the historical process.
After several dramatic protest confrontations with the U.S. government, by the mid-1970s radical Native American sovereignty activists had begun to regularly travel to Europe to build alliances in order to pressure the United States…
For our new series on Writing Radically we asked: how can we radically re-imagine the writing of history? Will Pooley discusses the radical role of grammar.
Barbara Taylor review's Tessa McWatt's 'Shame On Me: an anatomy of race and belonging'. Her review considers the discovery and rediscovery of friends, and how important this process is in order to understand disparities of power and…
Barbara Caine recounts a powerful friendship between two working women in early 20th century Britain. Eva & Ruth found friendship in their shared love of books - in the words of George Eliot & Charlotte Brontë - but most importantly in…
Early modern women and men possessed complex capacities for friendship, love, and devotion, and the nuances of these partnerships defy and challenge our received assumptions about early modern heterosexual and heterosocial relationships.…
