Subject Index: Modern History (Post World War II)

The content on this site is put into subject categories. These pages list content filed under each subject. You can also use the Tag Index to see a full list of keywords used on the site.

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 Japanese American revolutionary groups in 1969. The white radical organisations comprised displaced 'Southern' white working class people who were challenging […]

Three Minutes to Midnight: The Women’s Anti-Nuclear Protest at Greenham Common

Elaine Titcombe. History PhD Student, The University of the West of England, Bristol. In 1984 the doomsday clock reached three minutes to midnight. This was the closest recorded time to global destruction defined (at that time) as imminence to nuclear war, since 1953. This crisis arose as a result of an escalation of militarism between the East and West Superpowers, following the NATO decision in 1979 to modernise their theatre of nuclear weapons in response to the perceived superiority of the […]

Libres: Songs of the Spanish Revolution

Pilar Lopez’s performance about the Spanish Social Revolution of 1936 aims to draw inspiration from these amazing times, sharing the beauty and relevance of those events and making links with what's currently happening in Spain. In 1936, after a partially unsuccessful military coup and by popular demand, the libertarian unions took control of the organisation of society in many parts of Spain. In no time large portions of land and industry had been collectivised and belonged to the workers. This […]

The Fight against Blacklisting

armageddon
Di Parkin has been a left activist since the 1960s. She is a historian and published “60 years of struggle” history of Betteshanger, a militant Kent pit. She will be speaking about the actions on the Economic League in the 1970s, providing blacklisting information to employers and the impact on militants in places such as Cowley car works and Kent coal field. An electrician who has worked in the construction industry for 40 years will talk about his experiences of victimisation and the campaign […]

Kings Cross Tube Fire 25 years on

Health and Safety, Fight Club and neo-liberal logic

transparent fiddle Kings Cross Tube Fire 25 years on
Today (18th Nov 2012) is the 25th anniversary of the fire at Kings Cross tube station which killed 31 people and injured over 100 (see ) . The fire was 'blamed' at the time on a lit match which fell below the escalator and began the deadly inferno. The fire and subsequent inquiry led to the banning of smoking in stations, the phasing out of wooden escalators and forced London Underground to invest in heat and smoke detection systems, automatic sprinkler systems, CCTV and improved public address […]

Boris Johnson Airbrushed From History

Update (October 2013): the article seems to have reappeared on The Spectator website. On October 16th 2004 The Spectator published an unsigned editorial by Boris Johnson (aparently with a little help from Simon Heffer) in which he stated that Liverpool fans were wallowing in self pity when they themselves were responsible for the Hillsborough disaster. This article has since gone missing from The Spectator online archive. In an attempt to prevent it being airbrushed from history, here are the […]

Why The Hillsborough Panel Has Not Reported The Truth

On April 15, 1989 I was sitting in the North Stand at Hillsborough with a perfect view of the Leppings Lane end. Along with 40,000-odd other people I witnessed what has now been described as the biggest cover up in modern British history. How can you cover up something which is witnessed by over 40,000 people? As a 19-year-old, I returned to college after the spring break to read and watch reports of events which I knew to be false. It was not just The Sun. False reports were published by the […]

State Intervention and the Abolition of the National Dock Labour Scheme

The Bristol Experience

Pill from the Avon bank.
Now and again certain key industrial disputes serve as a reminder that the state not only plays a central role in struggles between capital and labour, but that its interventions tend to be heavily biased towards employers. One such dispute concerned the abolition of the National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS) in 1989, and the return of casual employment. In this case, state intervention was not only decisive in curtailing the ability of trade unions to take strike action but also delivered to the […]

‘The Short Hot Summer’: The August Riots in the UK, 2011

Miscellaneous 2012
The Hold Out 2313 San Pablo Ave, Oakland CA, USA The August ‘riots’ in Britain last summer were portrayed by the media and politicians as the actions of ‘greedy feral youth’ or ‘gangs’ within a ‘criminal underclass’. Most of these politically loaded explanations were presented before what had happened was even known. Using hard research and the voices of participants, this event will provide an analysis of the ‘riots’ of August, considering what (actually) happened, who was involved and how they […]

The Struggle Site

A website that has a lot of infomation about anarchism and some history pamphlets. For the first decade or so of the web the struggle site provided a home for pages concerned with the struggle for freedom. This included social struggles in Ireland; the Zapatistas, Irish history, anarchist theory and history, globalisation and many others. In 2004 there were over 5,000 documents and images on this site.

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