United Kingdom
East End Suffragettes: the photographs of Norah Smyth in London
Always impressive to see parts of our beautiful collection. How nice that we can occasionally share this and loan material for...
Onderzoek naar antisemitisme en immigratie in 5 landen
Vanmiddag werden in Londen de uitkomsten gepresenteerd van een Europees onderzoek naar antisemitisme en immigratie. Naast...
Maiming Animals
Some historians regard the mutilation of cattle and other animals as a act of social protest like incendiarism. A convicted...
Paid Holiday for Nurses
Until the twentieth century, paid holidays were rare for manual workers, as nurses were then considered. In July 1864, the...
Evil May Day
John Lincoln was imprisoned in the Tower of London on this day for being a leader of the Evil May Day Riots. Evil May Day was an...
A Merciless Place
The commonly held belief in 18th century Britain was that exiling felons was the best option for dealing with crime. By 1785 an...
A Special Métier
In mid-October 1737 Cornish tin miners rose up in arms to prevent the exportation of corn. Cornish tinners were premier food...
Sailor's Friend
The plight of the ordinary seaman commanded much attention from the British public in the mid-1870s. Some 20 percent of the...
March of the Blanketeers
Protest marches of the unemployed are generally associated with the 1920s and 1930s. An early forerunner is the March of the...
Peasant's Uprising
The English peasant's uprising of 1381 began in response to a tax levy, but was not only about money. It involved the right to...
Jamaican Immigrants
On 22 June 1947, the SS Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, UK, with some 500 adventurist Jamaican immigrants on board. Most of...
Poorly Clothed
'I am very bad in my bed Cloths which you know is very bad this weather and... I have no Shoes to Come in I assure you with all...
Starving Strikers
By the late nineteenth century, the hungry increasingly found themselves constructed as objects of compassion. In an IRSH...
Slave Ship "Zong"
In the days following 29 November 1781, the crew of the British slave ship "Zong" massacred around 130 enslaved Africans by...
Little Moscow in Wales
Miners from South Wales marched to London to draw atttention to 'the chronic destitution affecting unemployed and employed miners...
Flourishing Co-Operative Business
July 3 1863 was the founding date of the Co-operative Wholesale Society in Manchester. The roots of the co-operative movement are...
Northern Ireland
At the end of the 60s the Catholics in Northern Ireland increasingly revolted against Protestant domination. The tensions came to...
Contaminated Milk
Armed with 150 pints of pristine milk and a Russian banner, the British Committee of Hundred demonstrated in front of the Soviet...
Anti-Semitism in England
In its February 1948 issue, Chayenu, the magazine of the British socialist Zionists, warns about the increase in anti-Semitism in...
K9 Work
The method was copied from the Belgian milkman with his dog cart. According to the news magazine, dogs were an integral part of...
Never Mind the Bollocks
The release of 'Never mind the Bollocks', the new album of the Sex Pistols, was hot news in November 1977. And not only because...
World Press Freedom Day
In 1980 the British trade union TUC struggled with the Thatcher government. To protest against the economic and employment...
Mismanagement in British Mining
The Kashnor collection at the IISH is named after the London book antiquarians who sold their collection to the Institute in 1937...
Men with Monkey Testicles
The first successful implant of monkey testicles in a man dates from 1920. A French doctor of Russian descent, Serge Voronoff,...
No War Against a Nightmare
Tensions arose between Great Britain and Russia during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. Russia had gained increasing influence...
Handloom Weaver Elizabeth Peter Convicted
Coarse linen was spun and woven by female country workers in Forfarshire, Scotland, during the 19th century. This became a fast-...
Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland
Roman Catholic Irish were subdued to ethnic cleansing policy by Oliver Cromwell. After his suppression of a rebellion against the...
Labour Songs
God Save the Queen was one of twenty songs sung by the workers who had come to listen to the English labour leader Tom Mann on 14...
Divorce in 1895
The Daily Graphic was a lively daily with solid political news reports as well as 'tear jerkers.' A case in the divorce court...
British Strike Ends and Continues
The great British 1926 general strike officially lasted ten days. It started on May 3 to protest against a planned reduction in...
News from Prison
In 1916 Harold Bing (1897-1975) refused to serve in the army because he was a conscientious objector, and was imprisoned in...
Work Hours on a Voucher
Robert Owen was the "father" of the Co-operative movement. One of his creations in 1832 was the National Equitable Labour...
Black Friday
The British suffragettes were ladies with a fighting spirit. The women of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) were used...
British Miners
Britain's most bitter industrial dispute of recent times started with the announcement that a Yorkshire pit at Cortonwood was to...
Darwin Sold Out
Charles Darwin's On the origin of Species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle...
Collective wage payments in England
The payment of wages at an inn to child-labourers of a brickyard in central England in 1871. From the accompanying text: "The...
War Commentary
In November 1944 the police raided the London offices of Freedom Press, the centre of the anarchist press in England. The police...
Kamf un kemfer
The Russian Social Revolutionary Party in exile in Londen also tried to gain members among the Jewish workers of the immigrant...
B. Feigenbaum, Vi kumt a yid tsu sotsyalismus?
Benjamin Feigenbaum (1860-1932) was a true master of anti-religious satire. He used the religious knowledge he received from his...
Makhzor im tefiloh zokhoh leyomim hanoyrim ulekhol yemoys hashonoh
Anti-religious propaganda in the form of a prayer-book. Two pages from the book and an advertisement on the back for a would be...
Hagode shel pesakh: The Hagada
The Yiddish revolutionary propagandists tried to give Jewish tradition and the traditional Jewish festivals a new and socialist...
Campaign against Psychiatric Abuse
The Campaign against Psychiatric Abuse (CAPA), British section of the Geneva initiating committee against abuses of psychiatry...
Walter Kendall
In February 2010 the IISH received the vast archive of Walter Kendall. All his life Kendall (born in London in 1926) combined...
Colin Ward
The archive of the British anarchist and publicist Colin Ward (1924-2010) was donated to the IISH in 2010. Colin Ward became...
Gendered Money
As economic citizenship was a pre-condition of full citizenship, the lack of economic autonomy was an important motivation during...
United Kingdom Collection Guide
British social history writing spans about seven centuries, from the medieval farmers' protests and enclosure movement to the...
Rare Book Restituted
Ms Lija I. L'vova, Director of the Gosudarstvennaia Obshchestvenno-Politicheskaia Biblioteka (GOPB, Socio-Political State Library...
