Bulletin Society For The Study Of Labour History

Asa Briggs has been a prominent figure in post-war cultural life - as a pioneering historian, a far-sighted educational reformer, and a sensitive chronicler of the way in which broadcasting and communication more generally have shaped modern society. He has also been a devoted servant of the public good, involved in many inquiries, boards and trusts. Yet few accounts of public life in Britain since the Second World War include a discussion or appreciation of his influential role. This collection of essays provides the first critical assessment of Asa Briggs' career, using fresh research and new perspectives to analyse his contribution and impact on scholarship, the expansion of higher education at home and overseas, and his support and leadership for the arts and media more generally. The online bibliography of Asa Briggs' publications which accompanies the book is available on the The Institute of Historical Research website here.

With the onset of a more conservative political climate in the 1980s, social and especially labour history saw a decline in the popularity that they had enjoyed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This led to much debate on its future and function within the historical discipline as a whole. Some critics declared it dead altogether. Others have proposed a change of direction and a more or less exclusive focus on images and texts. The most constructive proposals have suggested that labour history in the past concentrated too much on class and that other identities of working people should be taken into account to a larger extent than they had been previously, such as gender, religion, and ethnicity. Although class as a social category is still as valid as it has been before, the questions now to be asked are to what extent non-class identities shape working people's lives and mentalities and how these are linked with the class system. In this volume some of the leading European historians of labour and the working classes address these questions. Two non-European scholars comment on their findings from an Indian, resp. American, point of view. The volume is rounded off by a most useful bibliography of recent studies in European labour history, class, gender, religion, and ethnicity.

A History of the Independent Labour Party

This book draws on a mass of documentary material to provide a major reinterpretation of British labour's response to the Spanish Civil War. It challenges the view that the labour leadership ' betrayed' the Spanish Republic, and that this polarised the movement along `left' versus 'right' lines. Instead, it argues that the overriding concern of the major leaders was to defend labour's institutional interests against the political destabilisation caused by the conflict, rather than to defend Spanish democracy. Although the main advocates of this position were trade union leaders associated with the labour right such as Walter Citrine and Ernest Bevin, the book argues that their dominance reflected the centrality of the trade unions to labour movement decision-making rather than the abuse of union power to achieve political goals.

The past ten years have seen a revival of interest in the recent history of the British labour movement, and particularly in the alleged 'lost opportunity'for a British revolution at some stage between 1900 and 1926. What is attempted here is a reassessment of the radical politics of the 1930's, a decade also mythologized in the recent past as one in which British intellectuals were either 'fellow-travelling' with Stalin or 'moving towards Marxism', depending on your point of view. My concern is not centrally with those poets, writers and scientists whose memoirs of the 'RedThirties' are readily avai.

This book offers the first full analysis of the Social Democratic Federation's (SDF's) history and is essential reading for historians of the Labour Movement.The SDF was the pioneer of the Socialist revival in the 1880s, Britain's first avowedly Marxist party and an important component of the Communist Party of Great Britain. As such, it represents a crucial strand in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century English political history.Although critical, Dr Crick dismisses the stereotype of a sectarian and dogmatic organization attempting to force a foreign ideology onto an unreceptive audience. Blending the national picture with a detailed study of the party in Lancashire and Yorkshire, he reveals an organization whose members contributed far more to the formation of local politics than is generally realized. They produced a generation of working-class militants, pioneered forms of social protest and made available for the first time in English a number of Marxist classics.

Monograph on historical trends in the trade union movement in the UK during the period from 1900 to 1940 with particular reference to the role of trades councils - covers trade union structure, workers representation, working class organization, political participation, the role of the labour political party and national level trade union federation (tuc), social implications of labour disputes (incl. The general strike of 1926), etc., and includes statistical tables on the membership of trades councils. Bibliography pp. 239 to 254 and references.

First published in 1985. Too often aspects of working-class life have been treated as distinct and separate. The contributors to this volume are aware of the dangers of such atomisation and have attempted to bring together a collection of studies which add to our knowledge of life in that time. The examinations of family, health, work, leisure and criminal trends form the basis of this work, and suggest that the everyday lives and values of the working-class were even more varied, creative and complex than is generally believed. This title will be of interest to students of history.