Tommy Atkins' hidden tactics to avoid combat on the Western Front in WW1 or why ‘Blackadder Goes Forth’ could have been a lot funnier (and more subversive)…
A young Army, but the finest we have ever marshalled; improvised at the sound of the cannonade, every man a volunteer, inspired not only by love of country but by a widespread conviction...
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Subject Index: Class
Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power
Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Race, Class and Gender in the 60s U.S.
This talk is based upon a series of books that have recently appeared covering the hidden history of the white working class radical community groups who formed the 'Rainbow Coalition' with the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Native American and...
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Pill Pilots
From the earliest days of recorded history river pilots have navigated ships through the dangerous waters of the Bristol Channel and up the river Avon, with its twisting bends, shifting sand banks and strong currents. In the early nineteenth century, Bristol was granted rights to compulsory pilotage over the whole of the Channel. The Society of Merchant Venturers managed and regulated licenced pilots on behalf of Bristol Corporation. However, pilots were self-employed and operated in competition with one another. Pilots would sail up and down the Channel hoping to catch first sight of an incoming vessel. Competition was fierce. The first pilot to board an incoming ship secured pilotage rights, a tradition that was long established and well supported by the piloting community.
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Pirates to Proletarians - The Experience of the Pilots and Watermen of Crockerne Pill in the Nineteenth Century
From the earliest days of recorded history river pilots have navigated ships through the dangerous waters of the Bristol Channel and up the river Avon, with its twisting bends, shifting sand banks and strong currents. In the early nineteenth century, Bristol was granted rights to compulsory pilotage over the whole of the Channel. The Society of...
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Resistance to Debt: Catiline, El Barzon and Strike Debt
Resistance to Debt is increasingly the way that class struggle is being expressed today. But debt resistance is not new. In Ancient Rome the battles between debtors and creditors were real ones, fought to the finish. This kind of struggle has returned in the late 20th century in many parts of the world though in a less bloody manner. Caffentzis...
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Drowning on Dry Land: Swansea’s Jack Kerouac
From working-class Wales through drugs, gambling and prison to punk, Paris fashion houses and San Francisco’s underground, Ray Jones editor of the notorious ‘Roughler’ magazine recounts his surreal life. So if chatting up Marianne Faithfull and rat arsing it with Keith Moon and Joe Strummer takes your fancy then Ray’s yer man.
Watch this...
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Workinig Class Bookfair
Two talks from BRHG. Where Now For The Left? The Land Is Your Land.
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The Intellectual Life Of The British Working Classes
This is a brilliant book for all people interested in the history of the working class . How good books, music and fine art moved the long revolution forward for the poor, uneducated masses, from the pre-industrial era to the twentieth century. All thinking people will be inspired by the memoirs, social surveys, statistics and research into how...
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Chavs: the demonization of the working class
The backdrop of this book is the social and economic transformation of society in Britain over the last 30 years overseen by the political management of Thatcher and Blair; characterised by the erosion of the British organised industrial working class, through the destruction of British industry. However the book is not concerned with looking at...
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By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700-1880
Political philosophers (such as Gramsci) and social historians (such as E. P. Thompson) have suggested that rural customs and ceremonies have much more to them than the picturesqueness which has attracted traditional folklorists. They can be seen to have a purpose in the structures of rural society. But no historian has really pursued this idea...
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