Monday 8 October Rupa Huq MP: from lecture room to Parliament: ‘From theory to
practice : the difficulties of transitioning from teaching society and politics
in the lecture hall/seminar to “doing “ it in Parliament.”
Monday 22 October Marika Sherwood: The beginning of the Cold War in Ghana (Gold
Coast) in 1948
Monday 5 November John Newsinger: The Other Spirit of '45: War, Empire and the
Attlee Governments
Monday 19 November Daryl Leeworthy Labour Country: Social Democracy's Roots and
Possibilities.
Monday 3 December Keith Flett. 50 years since the Pelican paperback of The
Making of the English Working Class. Still relevant?
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Conway Hall Ethical Society presents: Victorian Blogging – Writing Wrongs
Wednesday 31st October @ 7:00
pm - Wednesday 5th December
BOOK NOW
These talks are free. Please
register for talks by clicking on the links below.
Speakers: Prof. Joad
Raymond, Dr Joseph Kelly, Dr Gregory Claeys, Prof. David
Nash, Deborah Lavin & Viv Regan. Presented by Conway Hall Ethical
Society and curated by Deborah Lavin.
This series of talks is part of the
Heritage Lottery-funded project Victorian Blogging that will
see our collection of over 1,300 nineteenth-century pamphlets digitised and
made freely available online.
Forgotten at the back of dusty desk
drawers, foxed in crumbling box-files on library shelves, these pamphlets
disguise themselves as insubstantial ephemera of little consequence, but their
flimsy pages and the words they contain have proved to be quite the opposite —
the catalyst igniting revolutions, overthrowing governments, and altering the
course of history. These talks reflect some of the myriad issues covered in our
pamphlet collection including women’s rights, slavery, socialism, blasphemy
laws and the parallels between these Victorian pamphleteers and contemporary
bloggers.
Wednesdays, 31 October–5 December
2018, 19:00–20:30
31 October | Brockway Room
The First Resort: Pamphleteering
and Politics in Early Modern Britain
Prof. Joad Raymond charts the rise of
the pamphlet as a method to communicate alternative political ideas and
challenge power in early modern Britain.
7 November | Brockway Room
The Elimination of Slavery from
the Whole World: Problems of Anti-Slavery in Victorian Britain
Dr Joseph Kelly examines the problems
faced by the slavery abolition movement in Britain after the 1830s in their
efforts to eliminate slavery from the face of the earth.
14 November | Library* Marx, Morris and Utopia
Dr Gregory Claeys considers
whether, despite Marxism’s well-known rejection of earlier utopian
socialism, Karl Marx might be termed a utopian thinker, and how some of
his ideas were adapted but also built upon by the English socialist
William Morris.
21 November | Brockway Room Blasphemy, the Individual and
the State: From Historical Flashpoint to Contemporary Grievance
Prof. David Nash traces the long
battle to abolish the Blasphemy Laws in England, from the seventeenth century
to their abolition in 2008 and how the concept of blasphemy affects us all
today.
28 November | Library* Annie Besant and the Liberal,
Radical, Socialist and Feminist Opposition to Birth Control in the Nineteenth
Century
Deborah Lavin reveals how whilst
opposition to contraception may have been blinkered and bigoted, it was also
often liberal, radical, socialist and feminist.
5 December | Brockway Room The End of the Wild World Web?
Internet Freedom in the Twenty-First Century
Viv Regan of Spiked will
explore the threats to open debate and blogging online and discuss what has
happened to the lost promise of internet freedom.
Deborah Lavin is an independent
historian particularly interested in the conflicts between radicals and
socialists in the nineteenth century. At Conway Hall, she has given various
talks, mostly on issues connected to Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant and Karl
Marx; she has also curated several talks series, most recently The
British Business of Slavery and Stop the First World War.
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"Telling the
Mayflower Story, Thanksgiving or Land Grabbing, Massacres & Slavery?"
by Danny Reilly and Steve Cushion.
Fri 30 November
2018
17:30
UCL Institute of
the Americas
51 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0PN
In the autumn of
1620 the ship Mayflower, with 102 passengers, landed in North America and
started the colonisation of the area that became known as New England. The
Mayflower had landed in a region where the Sachem of the local Wampanoag Nation
was Massasoit, who subsequently helped them survive. In the autumn of 1676,
following the defeat of a war of rebellion led by Massasoit’s son Metacomet
(King Philip), the ship Seaflower set sail from New England with a ‘cargo’ of
Indigenous American slaves bound for the English Caribbean colonies.
The creation of the New England colonies by thousands of English colonists in
the seventeenth century involved the rapid decline in the indigenous
population, the violent seizure of territory and slavery. However, the 400-year
anniversary commemorations in the UK seem to be overlooking this.
The Mayflower journey was part of
Early English Colonialism:
• The invasions of Virginia, New England and the Caribbean were
accompanied by land seizure wars against the Indigenous peoples of North
America
• The economic success of New England depended on trade with the slave
colonies of the Caribbean, and included the trafficking of slaves
• The colonists established a pattern of ‘extravagant’ violence in the
wars they conducted against Indigenous Nations that was continued for 300 years
• The establishment of a tradition of sanitizing the story of English
colonialism in the Americas that has lasted 400 years
Danny Reilly is a support tutor
working in higher education and a volunteer ESOL teacher who has worked in a
voluntary capacity for several refugee support groups. He has been an
anti-racist activist for many years, a founder of the Campaign Against Racism
and Fascism and worked at the Institute of Race Relations from 1977 to 1993 as
information officer.
Steve Cushion is author of "The
Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the
Guerrillas’ Victory", "Killing Communists in Havana: The Start of the
Cold War in Latin America" and "Up Down Turn Around: The Political Economy
of Slavery and the Socialist case for Reparations". He is joint author,
with Dennis Bartholomew, of "By Our Own Hands: A People’s History of the
Grenadian Revolution". His current research is on German and Italian
volunteers who fought in the French Resistance.
Attendance to
this event is free of charge but registration is required.
=======================
from
London CND's upcoming events
- Free
CND public conference - open to all
- 10th
November, 9:30am-5pm
- Birkbeck University
of London, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX
[UPDATE] "Join CND this weekend for Future wars: the impact of new technologies – a conference that joins the dots about how the digital revolution is changing the shape of modern warfare. A dazzling line up of speakers on neurowarfare, surveillance, AI, drones, militarisation of space and a whole lot more…"
Birkbeck University of London
Room B36, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HZ
STOP PRESS
Watch conference live at facebook.com/CNDuk
---------------------------------------------------
London CND Peace Network Launches
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We're supporting local CND groups to create new Peace Networks across London. With London full of so many groups and individuals working for peace, solidarity and the preservation of the planet, we want to support informal discussions about ways we can work together and support each other’s efforts.
The East London Peace Network Launch will take place
at the Whitechapel Idea Store, Room 1A, at Thursday 8th November at 6.30pm.
Bookable with free ticket.
The re-launch of the once thriving Croydon Peace
Council will take place on Thursday 15th November at Ruskin House*, from
7.30-9.30. The speakers will be Carol Turner, author of 'Corbyn and Trident',
and Jan Woolf, a founder of No Glory in War. There will also be a film
screening of March to Aldermaston. *Cedar Hall, 23 Coombe Rd. CR0 1BD
The launch for West London Peace Network took place
last month, and gathered a number of enthusiastic activists. We're working on
future activities now, so if you're keen to get involved in West London, get in
touch by emailing info@londoncnd.org or phoning 07503318543.
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The Long Affray in the Nineteenth-Century East Midlands
A talk by Rosemary Muge
The terms ‘Long Affray’ and ‘Poaching Wars’ have been coined by historians to refer to the conflicts between poachers, particularly gangs of night poachers, and the gamekeepers and watchers employed by landowners. The Game Laws have been acknowledged as class-based, even by historians who would be reluctant to accept such a description. The passing of the 1831 Game Reform Act made the conflict even more clearly one between working-class people and the landed gentry. In Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire, poaching was endemic. The talk focuses on the causes, patterns and effects of poaching in these counties.
Rosemary is a retired teacher (of Maths not History) who has recently completed a PhD in History at the University of Nottingham, after 7 years of research and writing up. Previously she completed an MA on Crime and Policing at The Open University. Her interest in the subject area arose from living in East Anglia for many years, an area where poaching was endemic; and from teaching in prisons for 7 years, which gave her an interest in crime and the people called ‘criminals’.
There will be tea. There might be biscuits. There won’t be pheasant.
Saturday 27th Oct 2pm at The Sparrows’ Nest, Nottingham.
Free event, venue wheelchair accessible.
Please email us for directions: sparrowsnestlibrary@gmail.com
Visit the Sparrows' Nest website: http://thesparrowsnest.org.uk
=======================
Seminar - Workers in the Cuban Revolution
Tuesday October 23, 2018
6:30 PM – 9:00 PM BST
Marchmont Community Centre
62 Marchmont Street, London WC1N 1AB
Steve Cushion, author of "The Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution", with our third talk in the [
social history of revolutions] series, "Workers in the Cuban Revolution".
"To both its supporters and detractors, the Cuban Revolution is almost universally understood as having been won by a small band of guerrillas. This talk turns the conventional wisdom on its head, and argues that the Cuban working class played a much more decisive role in the Revolution’s outcome than previously understood. It contends that significant portions of the Cuban working class launched an underground movement in tandem with the guerrillas operating in the mountains.
"There was widespread working class militant activity, from illegal strikes and sabotage to armed conflict with the state, all of which culminated in two revolutionary workers’ congresses and the largest general strike in Cuban history. Cuban workers not only ensured the triumph of the Revolution, they went on to sustain it during its most difficult periods.
"Steve Cushion is a retired university lecturer living in East London. He is Branch Secretary of the University and College Union (UCU) London Retired Members’ Branch and is on the committees of the Socialist History Society and the Society for Caribbean Studies. He is also Secretary of Caribbean Labour Solidarity (CLS).
Steve is author of The Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory, Killing Communists in Havana: The Start of the Cold War in Latin America and Up Down Turn Around: The Political Economy of Slavery and the Socialist case for Reparations. He is joint author, with Dennis Bartholomew, of By Our Own Hands: A People’s History of the Grenadian Revolution. His current research is on German and Italian volunteers who fought in the French Resistance."
