The ICU was a union-cum-protest movement in the north-west of South Africa in the 1920s and 1930s. Laurence Stewart explores its messages and methods and their relevance today.
The History Workshop in Johannesburg emerged from intersecting impulses that coursed through the academy and society in South Africa and globally in the 1970s and 1980s. Noor Nieftagodien on its history and present.
In the years since the beginning of the Black Lives Matter Movement, Emma-Lee Amponsah reflects on the shared global experience of Black Cultural Memory.
May Ayim was key to the Black German civil rights movement in the 1980s and 1990s. But how did her work across borders exemplify cosmopolitanism from below? Tiffany N. Florvil explores the life and networks of a visionary.
What can the radical tradition of costume & performance at Notting Hill Carnival tell us about a decolonised approach to the teaching of history? Ife Thompson on the People's War Carnival Band
How was the eighteenth-century pursuit of knowledge intertwined with enslavement and empire? Lucy Moynihan on the history of literary institutions in the British colonial world.
The term 'racial capitalism' has been widely used by activists and historians. Catherine Hall turns to the 18th century entanglements between Jamaica and England to reflect on the shifting forms of racial capitalism across generations.
On 13th August 1977, a National Front march in Lewisham was halted by activists. Reflecting in 2022, Alfie Hancox considers what does the Battle of Lewisham might reveal about anti-fascist organising.
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…
From the 1970s onwards, basketball became an important source of expression, identity, and resilience in many Black British communities. Michael Romyn explores.
In the late eighteenth century Wedgwood’s medallion rallied people to the radical cause of abolition. Can it still inspire radical change today? Georgia Haseldine discusses the medallion’s historic radical power and re-making the…
An open letter from more than sixty scholars in defence of Black British History at Goldsmiths and beyond. Proposed cuts at Goldsmiths threaten the survival of field essential to understand the nation and the world’s past and present.
There is an urgent need for programmes that train people to research Queer History and Black British History. The first masters' programmes in these areas, at Goldsmiths, now face an existential threat due to the College's redundancy…
History Workshop Journal and History Workshop Online editors urge withdrawal of threatened redundancies at Goldsmiths, which especially target the History and English & Creative Writing departments
This new Virtual Special Issue of History Workshop Journal brings together over 30 years of research, to reflect on the meaning and significance of Black British history.
In the early morning on Sunday 18 January 1981, a fire broke out at 439 New Cross Road in the London Borough of Lewisham. The fire was almost certainly the result of a deliberate racist attack. Thirteen young Black Britons lost their lives…
How should we understand the connections between the transatlantic slave trade, the expansion of the British Empire, and the history of Australia? Emma Christopher explores.
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.
Molly Corlett reflects on the links between her research on racial trauma in the eighteenth-century, and her work for youth justice reform in Britain today.
How do we build healing history in the wake of a massacre? Hannibal B. Johnson writes about black achievement in Tulsa, Oklahoma and celebrates the architects of the “Greenwood District” who resisted white supremacy and racial…
How do we name empire and genocide, the structural violence embedded in our built environments, and why does it matter? Melanie J. Newton unpicks the contested legacy of Henry Dundas, eighteenth-century imperialist & "Uncrowned King of…
In October 1945, delegates from across the world gathered in Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall, half a mile south of St Peter’s Field, to take part in the Fifth Pan-African Congress.
The Black Report, a landmark critique of health inequalities that barely discussed ‘race’, turns forty today. Grace Redhead and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn investigate the legacy of the report for the age of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.
