The Black Presence website was formerly the Black Presence in Britain, a history site about black British history. The Black Presence in Britain website was set up in 1998 due to a lack of information about the contribution of Black people to British history to be found on the Internet.
Radical History Listings: Internet Resources
Here you will find a listing of things that the radical historian might find of interest. To filter the results use the menu below.
Family Letters
My grandfather was one of 6 brothers all involved in different theatres of the First World War: one was in the navy at Jutland, another in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and the rest were scattered around France and India. They all wrote home to their mother who unsurprisingly kept their letters. In the course of time my mother inherited them. In the 1970s my mother persuaded the Imperial War Museum to copy and transcribe the letters, and she then edited selections from the transcriptions and turned […]
Remembering The Real WW1
2014 is the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War. In line with Bristol’s long radical traditions we want to ensure that there are events locally remembering the reality of this war. The British government plans to spend £55 million on it’s own commemoration plans. Comments from David Cameron calling for a ‘truly national commemoration’ stressing our ‘national spirit’ suggest what he has in mind. He has even compared the government’s plans with last year’s Diamond Jubilee […]
Archive.org & Openlibrary.org
These are two related initiative that can be a great help when trying to do a little research form the comfort of ones own computer. Archive.org contains the Wayback Machine which archives snap shot of websites. You can thus see pages on websites as they used to be. However, archive.org also contains free and complete copies of many books that are out of copyright and in the public domain. Openlibrary.org aims to get "One web page for every book ever published". You can search for the details of […]
Alsatia
The idea is simple enough: to investigate the area of London known as Alsatia, and other similar ‘outlaw’ areas, their history, context and meanings. There are many tantalising references, but nothing substantial on the subject, so it offers challenges and rewards. Of course, I could just do some searching, some reading, and perhaps write an article or suchlike. But keeping track of all the fragments, questions and resonances requires some organization, and that in turn requires some tools. ... […]
Zinelibrary
A huge collection of ready to print zines on a variety of subjects including anarchism, cooking, ecology and technology.
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.
Google Books
Here is a list of some things of interset that can be found on Google Books: The Bristol riots, their causes, progress, and consequences. By a citizen [J. Eagles.]. A first hand account of the 1831 uprising from a concerned and upset citizen (yes, you guessed it not one of the mob). Trial of Charles Pinney. The Lord Mayor of Bristol during the 1831 uprising gets put on trial for failing to deal with the great unwashed. An Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade: In Two Parts. A seminal […]
History Our Weapon
Over 650 scanned pages of hard to find speeches, articles, pamphlets, etc about a range of resistance in US history. Here's a small sample: A People's History Of The United States by Howard Zinn (the whole goddamn thing) The War Prayer by Mark Twain Strike Against War by Helen Keller George Jackson: Black Revolutionary By Walter Rodney Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies by Bartoleme de Las Casas Eugene Debs' Statement to the Court Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act […]
Practical History
UK-based communist group, producing and gathering together various texts documenting the history of class struggle, both in the UK and internationally.