Seminar - Marcel van der Linden on global labour history

Marcel van der Linden is coming to talk on the state of Global Labour History to the Imperial and World History seminar series at the IHR on March 23.

Imperial and World History seminar
University of London: Spring term 2015
Convenors: Richard Drayton (KCL), Jen Altehenger (KCL), Toby Green (KCL), Tamson Pietsch
(Brunel), Sarah Stockwell (KCL), Gagan Sood (LSE), John Stuart (Kingston), David Todd (KCL), Jon Wilson (KCL)

Meetings are, except where indicated, on Mondays at 5.15pm in the Peter Marshall Room of the
Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, University of London

January 12
Max Edling (KCL): 1787: Birth of the American Empire
January 26
A. G. Hopkins (Cambridge and Austin): Globalisation, the Cold War, and the Decolonisation of the Insular Empire of the United States
February 23
Felipa Vicente (Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa): Portuguese India and British India: Comparing Colonialisms in the Nineteenth Century
March 9 Jon Slight (Cambridge): The British Empire and the Hajj in the First World War
March 23
Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History and Amsterdam): Global Labour History: Provisional Results and Further Prospects

IHR Research Seminar in Philosophy of History

RESEARCH SEMINAR IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY


This seminar is open to all those interested in the philosophy of history, broadly construed (including historiography, historical theory, methodology). Meetings take place five times in the Autumn and five in the Spring Terms, on alternate Thursdays at the IHR, usually in Room 304 (details below). They start at 5.30pm and last about two hours. For further information, contact Mark Mason at M.Mason@chi.ac.uk

For Spring Term 2015 Richard Saville has organized a series of papers on the theme of 'The Philosophy of Economic History'.


Spring Term 2015:
The Philosophy of Economic History



22nd January (Professor Olga Crisp Room 102). David Renton (Garden Court Chambers): 'The idea of the margin in Sidney Pollard’s economic history'.

5th February (Room 304).      John Foster (University of the West of Scotland): 'Karl Marx’s method and the study of history'.



19th February (Room 304). David Howell (University of York): 'Inventing Tradition: Eric Hobsbawm on Nations and Classes'.



5th March (Room 304). Nuala Zahedieh (University of Edinburgh): 'Eric Williams and the Materialist approach to the history of Slavery'.



19th March (Room 304). Richard Saville: 'John Richard Hicks and the theory of economic history'.

CfP: What's Happening in Black British History? II

@BlackBritHist  

#WHBBH2  

What’s Happening in Black British History? II 

Liverpool University 19th Feb 2015 

Call for Papers  

On 30 October 2014, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies launched a new series of workshops on Black British History with a highly successful event at Senate House in London, which attracted over 100 participants. The aim of the series is to foster a creative dialogue between researchers, educationalists (mainstream and supplementary), archivists and curators, and policy makers. It seeks to identify and promote innovative new research into the history of people of African origin or descent in the UK, and to discuss the latest developments in the dissemination of that history in a wide variety of settings including the media, the classroom and lecture hall, and museums and galleries.  

We are delighted to announce that the second workshop in the series will take place at the University of Liverpool in the Leggate Lecture Theatre of the Victoria Gallery & Museum on Thursday 19th Feb 2015. It will be hosted by the University of Liverpool and co-sponsored by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the University’s BME Staff Network. We would like to invite offers of presentations.  

While we are potentially interested in a broad range of subjects relating to Black British History, we are particularly keen to include a number of topics that were suggested at the previous workshop, or that we wish to develop further. These are: 

Gender, particularly histories of Black British women and the LGBT community;  

Education, with a particular emphasis on how to improve the coverage of black British history in schools, colleges and universities. Presentations from those actively involved in creating teaching resources would be particularly welcome;   

Sport, as a microcosm of the broader politics of race and the construction of black identities;  

Creative and Cultural Interpretations of Black British History, considering how these histories can be communicated in Art, Literature & Music;   

Emancipation, examining the agency of Black people in challenging physical and mental slavery and oppression.  

Local History, and specifically the history of Liverpool.   

The workshop will run from 11am to 6.30pm, followed by a reception. It will consist of three panels and a concluding round table discussion. Each panel will consist of three presentations lasting for 15-20 minutes. Please submit a title and a brief description of your presentation either in writing (in which case, of no more than 300 words) or in some other form (for example a clip or podcast) with an indication of which panel you envisage contributing to, to Dr Miranda Kaufmann at mirandackaufmann@gmail.com by 10 January 2015. 

We welcome individual proposals from researchers, educationalists, archivists and curators. In addition, we would be happy to consider proposals for a complete panel. The panel should have a coherent unifying theme, either relating to one of the themes mentioned above, or one of your own choice, and the proposal should include the abstracts of three related presentations and the names and affiliations of the presenters. We would also be interested in providing A-level students with an opportunity to give presentations on projects relating to Black British History.  

LSHG Spring Term 2015 seminars

London Socialist Historians Seminars Spring Term 2015

Monday January 19 - Marika Sherwood, 'Black Soldiers in World War One'

Monday February 2 - Matthew Burnett-Stewart, 'Arming both sides. The Armaments industry in World War One'.

Monday February 16 - Deborah Lavin, 'Anti-Socialist Working Class Radicalism in the Second Half of the 19th Century'

Saturday February 28 - '70 years since the 1945 Attlee Government': Francis Beckett, Ian Birchall, John Newsinger and others From 11.30am - [LSHG Conference]

Monday March 16 - Launch of A History of Riots (CSP) Keith Flett and others

All seminars take place in Room 102 at the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St, WC1 and start at 5.30pm with the exception of February 28th - all welcome. For more information please contact Keith Flett at the email address above

LSHG Roundtable on the Scottish Referendum

London Socialist Historians Group

Roundtable discussion on the historical implications of the Scottish Referendum result

Saturday 29^th November Midday to 4pm

Wolfson room Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St, London WC1

Neil Davidson (University of Glasgow) will lead off the discussion with:  'The Independence Referendum in the Longue Durée of Scottish History'

The discussion will start from around 1.30pm. From midday we will be showing a new film, Still Ragged, made to mark the 100^th anniversary of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

All welcome, admission free

Reminder of upcoming LSHG seminars

Upcoming Autumn term LSHG seminars

Mon Nov 24, 5.30pm, Olga Crisp Room (104), Institute of Historical Research, London

Merilyn Moos 

'Siegfried Moos: a lost revolutionary? The story of a German Communist who fled to Britain in 1934.'

Sat Nov 29^th , 12 noon, Large Wolfson Room (basement), Institute of Historical Research, London

Neil Davidson & others.  'The Scottish vote and history'

http://www.history.ac.uk/events/seminars/148

The John Lilburne 400 anniversary conference

The John Lilburne 400th Anniversary Conference

14 March 2015, 11m-9pm, Bishopsgate Institute, London

Born 400 years ago, John Lilburne’s courage and passion for justice was unfailing during the turbulent years of the English Revolution. Whipped, pilloried and often imprisoned in his lifetime, John Lilburne was a Leveller activist and pamphleteer who campaigned for radical change. He fought to establish many of the liberties and political freedoms that we take for granted today. He was a champion of popular sovereignty, trial by jury and the rights of the ordinary citizen.

Don’t miss this one-day celebration of the life and legacy of ‘Freeborn John’.

Speakers include Martine Brant and Peter Flannery (writers of The Devil’s Whore series on Channel 4), Ted Vallance (author of A Radical History of Britain), Dr Ariel Hessayon (Goldsmiths, University of London), Katherine Clements (author of The Crimson Ribbon), Jason Peacey (author of Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution), Dr Rachel Foxley (University of Reading and author of The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution), Jeremy Corbyn MP and Rev. Hammer (singer/songwriter and creator of the Freeborn John song cycle).

In partnership with The Levellers’ Association.

Financially supported by the Amiel and Melburn Trust and the Goldsmiths Annual Fund.

http://www.bishopsgate.org.uk/event/526/The-John-Lilburne-400th-Anniversary-Conference

Edited to update:

New speakers include Michael Braddick (author of God's Fury, England's Fire) and  Elliot Vernon (co-editor of The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution). 

Also the event has a twitter account: 

@levellers1649

Gramsci conference

PAST AND PRESENT.

Philosophy, Politics, and History in the thought of Gramsci 

 

International Conference

18-19 June 2015

London

Speakers: Fabio Frosini (Università di Urbino, Italy), Alex Loftus (King’s College London), Peter Thomas (Brunel University); including contributions from: Anne Showstack-Sassoon (Birkbeck), Cosimo Zene (SOAS). 

The legacy of the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) has been widely acknowledged as one of the most significant intellectual contributions of the twentieth century. Even as the historical events of his life have faded from living memory, Gramsci’s thought has increased in influence and become diffused amongst a multitude of disciplines in the academic firmament; from philosophy to history and geography, through cultural theory and subaltern studies, to international relations, linguistics, critical legal studies and beyond. In light of the widespread and heterogeneous deployments of his ideas, it seems apt and necessary to return to the texts themselves: Gramsci’s pre-prison and his prison writings, both the Prison Notebooks and the Letters from Prison. 

The aim of this conference is to bring together a new generation of scholars working on Gramscian themes in order to engage closely with his writings. Working in collaboration with experienced Gramsci scholars, this conference is the first initiative of a group of early-career researchers and graduate students. Through a combination of panels and workshops, the conference will provide participants with the opportunity to present their work and to receive constructive feedback in a friendly and stimulating environment.

 

The two-day international conference also aims to contribute to the process of building links between Anglophone and international, in particular Italian, Gramsci scholarship. The organizers hope to create a network through which to share research and encourage interactions between researchers from different countries working on Gramscian thought and related topics. It is proposed that an edited collection of essays will be published as a product of the conference and further engagements.

Gramsci’s perspective is marked by a profound sense of the manifold connections between the explanation of the past and the analysis of the present. Our intention is collectively to investigate the rich potentialities of the theme ‘Past and Present’ in his thought. Participants are invited to explore the conceptual laboratory of Gramsci’s historical-political narration, as well as his endeavour to theorize the unity of theory and practice. This nexus between ‘explication’ of the past and strategic ‘analysis’ of the present is characteristic of the originality of Gramsci’s approach to the ‘question of theory’. More broadly, the conference aspires to study the way in which Gramsci’s historical perspective intermingles with his engaged concern for the future of a ‘big and terrible’ world, in the sense that might today be called ‘global history’.

 

Gramsci’s ability to dialectically unite seemingly opposed elements (i.e. civil society and the state, structure and superstructure, the spatial elements of historicism, or vice versa the multiple temporalities going across the political space) illuminates the capacity of his thought to stimulate critical renewals in various domains of thought. Further investigation of this critical project reveals the aspect of ‘reciprocal translatability’ that Gramsci identifies between different facets of the knowledge of reality as ‘philosophy’, ‘politics’ and ‘economics’. The conference aims to explore the ongoing elaboration of this ‘homogeneous circle’ (Notebook 4, § 46), that is, the constitution of Gramsci’s conception of the world and its relation to history, understood as a unitary and dynamic process.

 

Consequently, we encourage paper proposals that analyze Gramsci’s thought (either the prison or his pre-prison writings) from political, philosophical, economic, and historical points of view, whilst evoking the connections between these different dimensions. Inter-disciplinary papers that focus on the reappraisal of Gramscian concepts in the contemporary world (within cultural theory, post-colonial studies, International Relations, geography, history of science, etc.) are also welcome. 

 

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: the Marxian legacy and the philosophy of praxis; Gramsci and global history: the ‘integral historian’; the Gramscian analysis of modernity: crisis, hegemony and passive revolution; the Party and the role of the traditional and organic intellectuals; Gramsci and pragmatism: language, truth, ideology; Anti-economism and Gramsci’s critical economy; Gramscian cultural writings; Centre and periphery; From ‘subaltern social groups’ to global subalternity. 

Abstracts of no more than 400 words should be sent by Friday 23 January 2015 to: gramsciconference2015@gmail.com

Supported by: 

- Department of Geography, King’s College London

- International Gramsci Society

- International Gramsci Society - Italia

- Ghilarza Summer School - Scuola internazionale di studi gramsciani

- Further support tbc

 

Organizing committee: 

Francesca Antonini (Università di Pavia, Italy)

Aaron Bernstein (King’s College London)

Lorenzo Fusaro (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM), Mexico)

Robert Jackson (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/gramsci-conference-2015-past-and-present

Final Stop the First World War talk

The very final talk in the series Stop the First World War:

7pm, Tuesday 11^th November.

Ian Birchall on "From Slaughter to Mutiny" 

Prof Christopher Read on "WWI and the Russian Revolution to 1923"

  Venue: Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, London WC1R 4RL. Time: 7.00 p.m.

 further info.

http://www.conwayhall.org.uk/stop-the-first-world-war-2

CfP: What is radical history?

Call for Papers
'What is Radical History?':
A One-Day Post-Graduate Led Interdisciplinary Conference
Tuesday, March 24th 2015. Birkbeck, University of London

'Historical writing always has some effect on us. It may reinforce passivity; it may activate us. In any case, the historian cannot choose to be neutral; [s]he writes on a moving train.' 
Howard Zinn

We invite post-graduates to submit abstracts for a one-day conference exploring the relationship between rigorous historical research and active political engagement. In 1970 Howard Zinn asked a question still important for politically-engaged academics today: 'what is radical history?' This conference will provide a space to re-engage with this debate, both to ask what we can learn from radical historical practice of the past but also to question what has changed in the intervening decades, and what a radical history might look like now.

We invite contributions from post-graduates from any disciplinary background who have a strong historical component to their research. We have identified three themes on which we especially invite reflections:
1. What identifies 'radical history' as 'radical'? Does its radicalism lie in its subject of study or in the
approach of the researcher?
2. How does 'radical history' negotiate the relationship between 'objectivity' and politics?
3. What use is 'radical history'? Does it have a role to play in emancipatory politics?
We welcome theoretical responses to the question 'what is radical history?' as well as contributions rooted in empirical research. We invite submissions of 10-20 minutes in length: these could be collaborative or individual in nature, and encompass interviews, short films, and papers, as well as other appropriate methods. We aim to generate a multidisciplinary analysis of the nature of 'radical history' today and of the challenges that politically active researchers across various departments currently face within academia and wider society.
The conference will end with a round-table between activist-academics including Dr. Becky Taylor (Birkbeck, History, Classics and Archaeology) and Dr. Robbie Shilliam (QMUL, International Relations), and an audience-participatory discussion. The event will be free to attend.
Prospective speakers are invited to submit abstracts of 250-300 words. Separately, please also include your name, affiliation and contact details, as well as full-details of the presentation method and any audio-visual or mobility requirements. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 22nd December 2014. For more
information about the conference, or to submit an abstract, please email the organising committee: Luca Lapolla (Birkbeck), Diarmaid Kelliher (Glasgow) and Julie Russell (Exeter) at:
radicalhistoryconference@gmail.com.
Please also see our website for more information: http://radicalhistoryconference.wordpress.com.
We are very grateful to the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London for funding this conference.

CFP: Manchester Social Movements conference

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS CONFERENCE  - CALL FOR PAPERS

From 1995 to 2014, Manchester Metropolitan University hosted a series of very successful annual international conferences on 'ALTERNATIVE FUTURES and POPULAR PROTEST'.

We're very happy to announce that the Twentieth AF&PP Conference will be held, between Monday 30^th March and Wednesday 1st April 2015. (Will we make it to Twenty One? Place your bets….)

Problems in getting information out of the university bureaucracy mean that we can’t yet definitely state what it will cost to attend. It should be very much as in previous years. But we wanted to get this information out now, with a promise of more to follow.

The Conference rubric will remain as in previous years. The aim is to explore the dynamics of popular movements, along with the ideas which animate their activists and supporters and which contribute to shaping their fate.

Reflecting the inherent cross-disciplinary nature of the issues, previous participants (from over 60 countries) have come from such specialisms as sociology, politics, cultural studies, social psychology, economics,  history and geography.  The Manchester conferences have been notable for discovering a fruitful and friendly meeting ground between activism and academia.

PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite offers of papers relevant to the conference themes.  Papers should address such matters as: 

* contemporary and historical social movements and popular protest 

* social movement theory

* utopias and experiments

* ideologies of collective action 

* etc.

To offer a paper, please contact either of the conference convenors with a brief abstract:  

EITHER Colin Barker,  

email: c.barker@mmu.ac.uk  

OR Mike Tyldesley, Dept. of Politics and Philosophy  

Manchester Metropolitan University  

Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamond Street West  

Manchester M15 6LL, England  

Tel: M. Tyldesley  0161 247 3460   

email: m.tyldesley@mmu.ac.uk  

Fax: 0161 247 6769 (+44 161 247 6769)  

(Wherever possible, please use email, especially as Colin Barker is a retired gent. Surface mail and faxes should only be addressed to Mike Tyldesley)  

CONFERENCE PAPERS

We ask those giving papers to supply them in advance, for inclusion on a CD of the complete papers which will be available from the conference opening.

* Preferred method: send the paper to Colin Barker as an email attachment in MS Word. Any separate illustrations etc. should be sent separately, in .jpg format.

* if this is impossible, post a copy of the text to Mike Tyldesley on a CD disk in MS Word format

* Final date for receipt of abstracts: Monday 9^th March 2015

* Final date for receipt of actual papers: Monday 16^th March 2015

MI5 and the Marxist historians

MI5 spied on leading British historians for decades, secret files reveal Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill had phones tapped, correspondence intercepted and friends and wives monitored...

Support the People's History Museum in Manchester

Reverse the £200,000 cut in funding to The People's History Museum in Manchester.

Why is this important?

The People's History Museum in Manchester is the only museum in England dedicated to celebrating the history of working people.  It tells the story of working people's contribution to this country in both peacetime and war.  It charts their struggles from the deportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, through Lancashire mill workers during the American Civil War as well as working people's solidarity with anti-apartheid campaigners in South Africa.

And now, during the centenary of the First World War, the museum's current exhibition tells the story of the working people of Britain throughout the war.  The museum's deputy editor Cath Birchall has said: “They [the government] don’t see the importance of a national museum that shows the effects of the war on ordinary people.”  A war where approximately 750,000 people died in combat and more than a million were injured fighting abroad, and which also resulted in huge numbers of domestic casualties with as many as 100,000 dying of malnutrition and disease.

Please stop the cuts and save this national treasure.  After all, in the words of Len McCluskey, "History is not just about those who write it, but about those who live it. Working people and the labour movement have been at the forefront of all social and political changes this country has undergone over the past three centuries. We must defend the People’s Museum ... and safeguard the one museum dedicated to telling the story of us all".

Sign the petition here: 

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/restore-funding-to-the-people-s-history-museum

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/01/tories-erase-working-peoples-history-museum-manchester

Book Review: A Matter of Intelligence

From LSHG Newsletter 53 (Autumn 2014)

Book Review of “A Matter of Intelligence. M15 and the Surveillance of Anti-Nazi Refugees 1933-50” (Manchester University Press, 2014) by Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove.

The concern of the police and security services with lefties is not new. A book has just come out which looks at MI5’s behaviour towards the political refugees from Nazism. Their role has so far been hidden from history.

MI5 were over-concerned with German – and subsequently Austrian - Communist refugees, indeed much of their resources were devoted to their surveillance and investigation. Although nobody knows exactly how many German Communists there were in Britain up till the November 1938 pogrom (Krystalnacht), we are probably talking of about twenty comrades who identified themselves as German Communists. There were a few dozen other people who were on the fringe of the German Communist Party, or who passed through the UK on their way, usually, to the US, but altogether, there were not many people in the UK who could have been reasonably categorised as German Communist refugees.

There were reasons for the small number of anti-Nazi exiles in the UK.  The Home Office did not want Communists in the UK.  According to Brinson and Dove, from after the end of World War One, the Prussian Secret Service gave information to the MI5 about their Communists. The Home Office would have been well prepared. A tragically small percentage of people who applied for the right to land in the UK received permission to do so. This did not just apply to left refugees, but also to Jews (sometimes an overlapping category) and everybody else: industrialists, Social- Democrats etc, seeking refuge. The greater the need for asylum, for example after the 1938 Pogrom or the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the more difficult it became to get in.  In addition, German KPD refugees in the years immediately after the Nazis gained power generally wanted to stay nearer than Britain to build and maintain some sort of illegal KPD organisation which could influence the German anti-Nazi struggle.

So why were MI5 so obsessed? Two if not three of their bug-bears coincided in the person of the German anti-Nazi refugees: firstly, they were German, secondly, they were Communists and God forbid, many of them were Jews as well. Kell, who had risen to be the MI5 boss, was far more sympathetic to the fascists than the communists. The British Union of Fascists he saw at one time as a patriotic bunch, representing the interests of all, unlike those Communist class warriors.

Opening the refugees’ mail was MI5 favoured form of spying (advantageous when, as is my case, you want to research some of these people!) They also infiltrated the groups and friendship networks. The Communist exiles lived in dread. They were not allowed to participate in political activity as a condition of being granted temporary rights of residence but this was something many of these people, who had given their all in the opposition to the Nazis, pre- and post- 1933, found difficult to comply with. A small KPD group in exile was established which went against these restrictions, leaving them very aware of the possibility of betrayal: which did indeed occur. (And though it falls outside this book, it seems so great was the Government’s dislike of these exiles, that. even though they were desperate for information on and contacts with the German opposition/underground, especially after the outbreak of war, they never made use of this little bunch of well - connected exiles.)

Nor did MI5 stop with the end of the war. By mid-1940s, the USSR was seen as the enemy. Although there were a few ‘ex’-Nazis floating around, the Nazi system had collapsed and insofar as it had ever been, Nazism was no longer seen as the threat. My mother’s files were still being sent to the CIA in the early 1950s.Recently opened MI5 files have divulged that they were still keeping a close eye on Peter Pears in 1951 on the grounds that he was the Vice-President of the Musicians Union for Peace and a member of the League for Democracy, both described by M15 as ‘Communist Front organisations’. Two years later, in 1953, MI5 were concerned with Pears’ partner, Britten, as a well- known pacifist. MI5’s file on Priestley started in 1933 and effectively continued till 1960. What alerted them appears to be that he was a member of the early National Council for Civil Liberties in the 1930s. As late as 1956, MI5 had a report, presumably from a ‘spy’, of a meeting which Priestley attended about police powers! He was, they said, associated with left-wing causes, but the appreciation that ‘none [were] Communist inspired’ did not stop the surveillance.

But there is hope yet.  What emerges from this book is how much MI5 bungled everything: their priorities were to keep an eye on lefties but they concentrated on people who were harmless and let other ‘real spies’ slip by. MI5 failed to identify or prioritise the very few cases which could be defined as a ‘security risk’. They failed to spot Klaus Fuchs, the ‘atomic spy’ for the USSR until late in the 1940s. In the case of his fellow atomic spy, Englebert   Broda, it failed to take any action at all. In the case of Edith Tudor- Hart, they may have kept policemen on watch outside her house and intercepted her mail in the 1930’s, but they did not even realise she was a member of the Communist Party, never mind a crucial agent. In the meantime, however, many political refugees were left feeling overwhelmed with a fear of being spied on and deported.

The final blow for many of these anti-Nazis was internment in 1940 when anti-Nazi and a few Nazis were packed together in internment camps, some in very poor conditions. Amidst talk of a ‘fifth column’ and the enemy within, MI5 saw its task, sometimes against Home Office advice, to intern people who had the rights to temporary abode in a foreign -‘democratic’ – country because they had opposed Nazism and had to escape or die.

Why has so little light been cast on MI5’s disgraceful activities during this period? Brinson and Dove suggest their record does them no favours so they have preferred it kept quiet. This book has finally pulled together how Mi5 operated in relation to a number of anti-Nazi exiles. It is also of interest because unlike so much that is written in relation to the lead-up to the war and the barbarism of Nazism, this is a book which finally looks at the people who chose to stand up against Nazism in Germany and Austria, the people in whose shoes we tread, despite our disagreements with the Communist Party, and the responses of the British State to them.

Merilyn Moos

Edited to add: On Monday Nov 24 Merilyn Moos will be speaking in London on 'Siegfried Moos: a lost revolutionary? The story of a German Communist who fled to Britain in 1934.' as part of the LSHG seminar series.   

Assorted London meetings of interest

Terrorism, Feminism and a Century of War,1914-2014

 Bojan Aleksov on Gavrilo Princip, the assassin who triggered World War One

Laura Schwartz on feminism and the Great War

Gabriel Levy on Putin and the war in the Ukraine

 

5pm, Mason Lecture Theatre

Anarchist Bookfair

Saturday 18 Oct.

Queen Mary Uni., Mile End Rd. E1 4NS.

 See www.anarchistbookfair.org.uk for more on a day of meetings: Peter Linebaugh, Middle East, Africa, Guy Debord, feminism, anti-fascism, abortion, workplace & housing struggles etc…

 

****************

Paine, Carlile, Cobbett, Chartists, Marx, Morris, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Matchwomen, Pankhurst, Goldman

 ‘RADICAL HISTORY OF FLEET STREET’ WALK

with PETER LINEBAUGH,

author of: 'The London Hanged'

Sunday 19 October, 2.30pm

 St. Bride’s Avenue, Fleet St. EC4 1DH. Blackfriars Tube.

maydayrooms.org

 

***************                                                 

FILM SCREENING

'Sylvia Pankhurst: Everything is Possible'

Thursday 6 November, 7pm.

88 Fleet Street,

St. Bride’s Ave., EC4 1DH.

Blackfriars Tube.

www.therealww1.wordpress.com

Louise Raw on Gender, Class, Sexuality and the Matchwomen's Strike

‘Bad Girls' Who Changed the World : Gender, Class, Sexuality & the Matchwomen's Strike.A talk by Louise Raw. Tuesday October 14,  6.30–9.00pm.  Upstairs in the Cock Tavern, 23 Phoenix Rd., NW1 1HB (Euston). Entry free. More Info: radicalanthropologygroup.org

LSHG seminar - Killing Communists in Havana

London Socialist Historians Group Seminar - all welcome 

Killing Communists in Havana: 1947 and the Start of the Cold War in Latin America 

Steve Cushion 

13 October 2014, 17:30 - 19:30 - Institute of Historical Research 

Seminars are in the Olga Crisp Room [104] at the IHR Senate House, Malet St, London, WC1 . Free without ticket. 

The Cold War started early in Cuba, with anti-communist purges of the trade unions already under way by 1947. Corruption and government intervention succeeded in removing the left-wing leaders of many unions but, in those sectors where this approach failed, gunmen linked to the ruling party shot and killed a dozen leading trade union militants, including the general secretary of the sugar workers union. Part of the objective of this attack was to increase productivity and restore profitability in the difficult post-war economic climate and the failure to achieve this would ultimately lead to Batista's coup d'etat in 1952. 

Based on material from the Cuban archives and confidential US State Department files, this paper will examine the activities of the US government, the Mafia and the American Federation of Labor, as well as corrupt Cuban politicians and local gangsters, in this early episode of the Cold War.