Campaign flyer for the Musicians’ Union

Between the mid 1930s and the late 1980s, radio in the UK was subject to a set of restrictions covering the amount of recorded music which could be played. Known as “needletime”, the system evolved following a legal ruling in 1933 which held that those whose performances were captured in recordings had the  right to receive compensation for the use of those recordings in public places such as shops, theatres, dance halls and – vitally – across the airwaves. Continue reading →

A still from ‘The Proud City – A Plan for London,’ produced for the Ministry of Information in 1946. Available to view in full at https://archive.org/details/ProudCity

There are few fields of study in the humanities or social sciences that remain untouched by the challenges which developed out of philosophy and social theory in the second half of the twentieth century, but British planning history is arguably one such area.  To suggest that this is the case is not meant to be read as an attempt to damn the work that currently constitutes the field, but it is intended to underline that there remains scope for further work that would expand and multiply histories of British planning, perhaps unsettling but also enriching what is currently a rather singular field. Continue reading →

Even though male homosexuality was decriminalised in Britain in 1967, it still occupied a legal grey area in which it could be classified as an ‘unlawful’ act contrary to the public good. This was because of the revival of a common law offence known as ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’ which was applied to those gay men who were advertising in the new gay press for friends and lovers. Continue reading →

David Cameron spoke earlier this year of his desire for the ‘wholesale reform’ of the UK prison system. He explained:

A sad but true fact is that last year there were 100 babies in our country living in a prison. Yes, actually inside the prison. In the prison’s mother and baby unit, to be precise. Prison staff do their best to make these environments pleasant. Some units even have special sensory rooms, so that babies can see colours, sights and sound – even nature – that they wouldn’t otherwise see inside the grey walls of a jail. I understand why this happens. But we should ask ourselves: is it right? When we know the importance of the early years for child development, how can we possibly justify having babies behind bars?

The presence of babies in the prison system is not a new phenomenon and neither is Cameron’s concern particularly novel. Continue reading →

To rethink the history of disability and employment, we can turn to one of Britain’s most dangerous industries.

Introduction

Coal was one of the most notoriously dangerous British industries. Many of its most deadly incidents are well known: the Hartley Colliery disaster of 1862 that trapped and killed 204 miners in Northumberland and the 1913 explosion at Universal Colliery in Senghenydd, South Wales, that took 439 lives, to name just two. Yet everyday accidents were equally commonplace. Unlike major disasters, the common accidents, injuries and diseases faced by coalminers are near-impossible to collate and quantify. Continue reading →

Social History has been publishing innovative research and provocative discussion in the field since its launch in 1976.  To mark its 40th anniversary, we have brought together a small selection of the material that has appeared in the journal over the last four decades. Continue reading →

INTERIOR OF ENGINE ROOM, BLOOMING MILL. CRANK AND DIAMETER FLYWHEEL. Republic Iron & Steel Company, Youngstown Works, Blooming Mill & Blooming Mill Engines. (1988) Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

 Between 1976 and 1992, scores of workers, progressive labour activists and citizens, and communities rose to oppose what progressive economists Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison called ‘the deindustrialization of America.’[1] Coalitions of workers, union organizers, religious and civil rights leaders, and progressive activists resisted plant shutdowns in cities across the country such as Cleveland, Youngstown, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Continue reading →

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, talented historian of Europe and Latin America, was an active member of the Social History editorial board for more than ten years until his death in 2015. To commemorate his work, Routledge has made the essays he published in Social History freely available online.

Continue reading →

Marfa Ilinitchna Riazantseva, 1937. Courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery

Photographs fortify evidence. They record, reveal, reproduce and validate information that can be shaped into persuasive inventories for prosecution. As a pervasive visual media, photographs have long corroborated evidence, from Eadweard Muybridge’s demonstrations of motion (1872), to their implementation in practices of criminal identification and surveillance. The Burden of Proof: The Construction of Visual Evidence exhibition, currently on display at the Photographers’ Gallery, presents eleven such inventories of criminality and violence, tracing the application of photographic evidence from the early twentieth century to the current era of virtual, multi-medial and multitudinal photographic use. Continue reading →

Recently, I had the chance to see Jacques Feyder’s 1923 masterpiece Visages d’enfants at a genuine 1920’s palace of film, the Louxor cinema in the Parisian district of Barbès. The film had been freshly restored due to the inimitable Serge Bromberg (more on his efforts to preserve and publicise forgotten classics of the black and white era can be found at Lobster Films) who also accompanied the screening on piano.

I was amazed to see how seriously the director Feyder and his screenwriters Françoise Rosay and Dimitri De Zoubaloff had taken the concerns and preoccupations of their child protagonists. Continue reading →