History Workshop Podcast

Did socialism destroy nature?

Is war innate to human psychology?

How might historians of the 2022 People's Uprising in Sri Lanka explore ongoing struggles for accountability and justice?

Exploring the enigma that was the Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali, author of the classic postcolonial novel Beer in the Snooker Club.

How did a 1911 East End police shootout affect the history of anarchism in London and beyond?

How did trans history find a foothold in the academy - and what is its future? Susan Stryker discusses with Claire Potter on this episode of the Why Now podcast.

The novelist Amitava Kumar on history, fiction, India, and ordinary lives.

How has modern queer life been affected by its encounters with psychiatric power?

How can we investigate disability history and heritage?

Natasha Walter on her mother's life of activism and resistance.

What is the future of common spaces and community gathering spots in the UK? At a time when so many spaces that once were shared are now either derelict or in private hands, when it can be difficult to find somewhere to gather with friends without buying a latte in order to do so, how might the future be different? How might we rethink our relationship with public space, the land, and each other? Those are the questions that audio producer May Robson set out to answer in a new series for BBC Sounds Audio Lab called Now Here.

What possibilities do podcasts offer as vehicles for radical history? Albert Scharenberg of the Rosalux History podcast discusses.

How might we translate the French Revolution in ways that open it up to the 21st century?

A new collection of Raphael Samuel's essays illuminates 19th century Britain and the politics of "people's history".

What does the accidental death of an anarchist in London in 1894 tell us about forgotten histories of direct action?

What can two different stories of postcolonial archival practices tell us about memory, history-making, and decolonisation?

What can a single image of a lone female protestor tell us about the "Battle of Grosvenor Square" in 1968?

What can we learn from a 45-year-old Swedish manifesto that helped inspire the movement for workers' history?

The political climate greeting refugees to the UK is no longer simply hostile - it is expulsive. David Herd explores.

What lessons might the past hold for migrants seeking childcare in the UK but having No Recourse to Public Funds?

Who do you think of when you hear the phrase “revolutionary women”? If you cast your mind back to the movers and shakers of the revolutions that marked the 20th century, what women's names come to mind? Sorcha Thomson and others discuss their book She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped the World.

Histories of gay men, lesbians, queer and trans people often focus on the heroic. But what about the gay characters whose impact on history was far more ambiguous, or complicated, or out-and-out bad? Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey, hosts of the Bad Gays podcast and authors of Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, discuss what those complicated lives can tell us about the dynamics of queer history and the formation of sexual identities.

What do we mean, in post-Brexit Britain, when we talk about "ordinary working-class places"? Valerie Wright, Ewan Gibbs, and Diarmaid Kelliher explore.

In September 2022, a group of public historians from outside and inside the academy met at London's Birkbeck College in the heart of Bloomsbury to ask ‘What is public history now?' In this special edition of the History Workshop Podcast, we explore the politics, the perils, and the possibilities of doing history in public.

What happens to narratives of British labour history when we incorporate stories of women? Laura Schwartz and George Stevenson explore.

To mark International Workers Day, we explore three forgotten moments in British history that spotlight the intertwined histories of labour and race.

Sixty years after breaking into a government bunker to expose secret state planning for nuclear conflict, Nic Ralph speaks for the first time about an extraordinary piece of direct action that genuinely worked.

What does it mean to write "intimate histories" of economic life? How might a focus on "the intimate" transform the way historians perceive and describe the economic past? Six scholars address those questions in this episode of the History Workshop podcast.

How can historians meaningfully and ethically research past experiences of sexual violence? What tools do they need to uncover a subject so intensely emotive and yet often accessible only through sources employing the dry legal or clinical language of institutions and bureaucracies? Ruth Beecher and Rhian Keyse discuss in conversation with Marybeth Hamilton in this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.

How might we understand the origins and the impact of current controversies raging in Britain over changing interpretations of British colonial history? How can those working on British colonial history intervene effectively in often fraught public debates? Corinne Fowler reflects on those questions in her June 2022 Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture.

Since the twentieth century, and perhaps even dating back further, the phrase 'black internationalism' has served as shorthand for a range of debates about Pan-Africanism and connections between various parts of the African Diaspora. The phrase has also been linked to other connected topics such as anti-Black racism, Black political activism, western colonisation of Africa and the Caribbean, anti-colonialism, and feminism, to name just a few. So how can we best define black internationalism? How might the concept illuminate the variegated historical forces shaping the experiences of people of African descent? Olivette Otele, who serves as Distinguished Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery at SOAS, University of London, explores those questions in conversation with History Workshop's Imaobong Umoren, in a wide-ranging discussion of the history of the concept of black internationalism, the foundations of black internationalist writing, and its future as a scholarly field and as a force for visionary political change.

The struggle for women's right to vote is often thought to have been waged on a national level. But how was this movement transnational? In what ways was international travel important to women's agitation for the vote? How did women move between nations and inspire and challenge each other? If they stayed local, what helped them to feel part of an international community? Historians James Keating and Summit Mukherjee discuss those questions in conversation with Rosa Campbell.

What is the history of activism against sexual violence? What kinds of strategies have survivors employed to combat it and to counter the stigma that has too often surrounded it? What kinds of narratives of resistance and protest have historically been given priority – and what voices have been left out? Today's guests are committed to examining those questions through their involvement with an interdisciplinary research project called SHAME - an acronym for Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters - which explores the links between sexual violence, medicine, and psychiatry.

How has the concept of "useful knowledge" shaped the two-hundred year history of Birkbeck College London - and workers education more generally? Joanna Bourke, Jonny Matfin, and Ciaran O'Donohue discuss with Marybeth Hamilton in this episode of the History Workshop podcast.

How can the stories of families illuminate the histories of migrations? Julia Laite and guests discuss in this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.

In this episode of the History Workshop Podcast, Elly Robson is in conversation with Professor Vinita Damodaran and Professor Harriet Ritvo to look at the ways that we know nature and how these have been political, in the past and today. Together, they discuss the rise of scientific expertise, its entanglement in projects of empire, and how it has interacted with indigenous and local knowledge. We also hear about whether solutions to climate change today can be left to scientists, what is meant by the Anthropocene, and about the politics of conservation.

Ridley Road has recently gained attention as the subject of a new BBC drama about the revival of fascism in 1960s London and the anti-fascist action taken by the Jewish community in East London. Ridley Road Market has been around for almost 140 years and has been described as a “hub of connection, interconnections and social interaction”. Historically and today, the market is run by and for diverse communities and forms a public space which is political. Like many markets, however, Ridley Road is at risk from "regeneration", gentrification, and social cleansing. In this episode by the audio producer May Robson, we hear local residents' memories of Ridley Road's anti-fascist history and about the struggles that market traders face today - from gentrification to lockdown.

Sheila Rowbotham is a writer, an historian, an activist, and an internationally renowned socialist feminist. In 1970 she participated in the first British Women's Liberation Conference at Ruskin College Oxford, and two years later she published Women, Resistance, and Revolution, a pathbreaking analysis of women's participation in radical upheavals that was immediately translated into multiple languages and is now recognized as a feminist classic. In 2000, she published a memoir, Promise of a Dream, which followed her first steps as a political radical and as an activist for women's liberation over the course of the 1960s. She has now followed it with a second volume, Daring to Hope, a year-by-year exploration of her life in the 1970s, when she gained a global reputation as a writer and activist for whom women's liberation and socialist revolution inextricably went hand in hand. In conversation with Marybeth Hamilton, she discusses the political challenges of feminist activism and the intimate challenges of navigating a life devoted to transformation, in which the personal was understood to be political.

How can black feminism lead to our collective liberation? Today we hear from the Black feminist writers, thinkers and activists Stella Dadzie and Chardine Taylor Stone, who join Rosa Campbell to discuss internationalism, the importance of collectivity, the role history might play in achieving justice and hope in difficult times. Listen now on Soundcloud - Apple Podcasts - Spotify - Stitcher - or wherever you get your podcasts.

How has the writing of Black British histories functioned as both a form of historical analysis and a voice of radical oppositional politics? Caroline Bressey, Meleisa Ono-George, and Sadiah Qureshi discuss with Marybeth Hamilton in this episode of the History Workshop podcast.

How can the power and invention of Forum Theatre inform radical histories of oppressed groups, such as the homeless? To mark World Homelessness Day on 10 October, Peter Jones speaks with Adrian Jackson, founder of Cardboard Citizens, a theatre company working with homeless people, on the latest episode of the History Workshop Podcast.

What are we doing when we research and tell stories of families, whether other peoples' families or our own? Julia Laite and guests discuss in this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.

What are transnational solidarities and how do they expand our understanding of interactions beyond the nation state? Do they offer a way to understand how actors beyond the West engage with and shape global transformations? Lydia Walker and Su Lin Lewis discuss with Ria Kapoor in this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.

Hazel Carby's book Imperial Intimacies: a Tale of Two Islands uses the lens of her own family history to make a deep dive into the workings of patriarchal, racialized, and gendered power. She draws on that book for this year's Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture, titled "Imperial Sexual Economies." Her lecture forms this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.

In 1910, a sixteen year old New Zealander named Lydia Harvey boarded a steamship bound for Buenos Aires in the company of a husband and wife who promised her a life of glamor and ease. What resulted was a journey into the world of commercial sex that took her from South America to London, where she turned the tables on her traffickers and became a star witness in their criminal trial. Up until now, that witness testimony constituted Lydia Harvey's lone moment in the historical spotlight. In the sweeping historical dramas of migration, crime, and sexual commerce, she was, at most, a bit player, who steps fleetingly out of the shadows, speaks her two or three lines, and then disappears. In her new book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, the historian Julia Laite places Harvey's story centre stage. The book that results is a riveting narrative history that puts complex human faces on stories too often told through stock characters: histories of prostitution, of policing, of criminal justice and moral panics. It also is a meditation on the politics of storytelling and the ethics of historical “rescue”, of historians' efforts to give voice to the voiceless and to spotlight the neglected and obscure. In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, Julia Laite discusses her book with Marybeth Hamilton. Listen now on Soundcloud - Apple Podcasts - Spotify - Stitcher - or wherever you get your podcasts.

How can we write the history of AIDS activism so that all stories are equally important? In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, Sarah Schulman discusses how she navigated that challenge in her new book Let The Record Show: a Political History of ACT-UP New York.

How can historians best document, preserve, and make accessible the voices and artifacts of refugee and migration experience? What kinds of materials would such a collection involve? How can archives respond, ethically and practically, to the challenge of conserving materials from under-represented communities whose lives remain so politicized and whose experiences raise such thorny issues of nationalism, immigration, identity and belonging? In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, Ria Kapoor speaks to four historians and archivists who are grappling with those questions: Paul Dudman; Heather Faulkner; Mezna Qato, and Peter Gatrell.

How do we write the history of women’s lives when history itself has hidden them? In this International Women’s Day episode of the History Workshop Podcast, Christopher Kissane speaks to the Irish poet and writer Doireann ní Ghríofa about her book 'A Ghost in the Throat', winner of the An Post Irish National Book of the Year and the Foyle’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year. The book weaves together the stories of two women, separated by centuries: Doireann’s experiences as a young mother in twenty-first century Ireland, and the lost life of the poet Eibhlín Dubh ní Chonaill, whose lament for her murdered husband, Caoineadh Airt uí Laoghaire, has been described as the greatest Irish poem of the eighteenth-century. Finding Eibhlín Dubh’s story repeatedly obscured by her famous male relatives and an ‘academic gaze [that swiftly] places her in a masculine shadow, as though she could only be of interest as a satellite to male lives’, Doireann searches for the poet’s life with ‘the brazen audacity of one positioned far from the tall walls of the university’. Through research and imagination, between dropping her children to school and putting them to bed, she constructs a very different history. ‘This’, the book begins, ‘is a female text’.

In this episode on queer education, Elly Robson is joined by Syeda Ali and Nazmia Jamal to discuss how queer lives can be integrated into school curricula and cultures. The history of queer education in the UK has often been one of deliberate silence: a silence that was officially legislated between 1988 and 2003 by Section 28, which made it illegal for schools to 'promote homosexuality'. We explore stories of resistance and trace Section 28's legacies, including what lessons it might hold for teachers seeking to challenge the Islamophobic Prevent strategy today. To find out more about resources referenced in this podcast, check out - Nazmia Jamal's new LGBT+ poetry resource for the Poetry Society: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/education/learning-from-home/secondary-14-poets-for-lgbt-history-month-and-always/ - the Rebel Dykes documentary: https://www.rebeldykes1980s.com/ - the letter to the Independent in September 2019, titled "The government is hijacking LGBT+ sex education to bolster its counterterrorism strategy": https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/lgbt-no-outsiders-rse-birmingham-muslim-prevent-values-a9092781.html

In episode three of our four-part series on Queer Activisms, Laura Forster is joined by Ajamu X and E-J Scott to discuss public history, the queer archive, and what it means to queer the museum. Listen now to the conversation on the History Workshop Podcast.

In this four-part podcast series on Queer Activisms, historians, performers, educators and activists take a deep dive into existence and resistance in queer life – past and present. In our second episode, Marybeth Hamilton is joined by Matt Cook and Debra Levine to discuss AIDS, queer activism, and the politics of loss and grief.