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Posts tagged: history

  • Talking shit

    Talking shit

    What links Karl Marx, William S. Burroughs, Dalit struggles in India and the Yetties' famous Muckspreader Song? Ed Emery writes on the centrality of excrement, both metaphorical and literal, to the modern world.
  • Choose your side. Choose your weapons

    Choose your side. Choose your weapons

    Published 20 years after the 1984-85 miners' strike that it portrays, David Peace's kaleidoscopic novel GB84 depicted the affective realities of the struggle as it was fought by pickets, policemen. Alexander Curtis asks what the literature can teach us about the past and present of class war.
  • A Political Education

    A Political Education

    Alexander Baron, the writer, political activist, journalist, soldier, and prominent figure in mid-twentieth-century British cultural history, is best remembered today as the author of the novels The Human Kind (1953), The Lowlife (1963), and King Dido (1969). In this extract from his recently published memoir Chapters of Accidents, introduced by his son Nick Baron, he recounts his political education in interwar East London.
  • (The Oglala Lakota Chief Red Cloud posing for a photograph with Othniel Charles Marsh while holding a sacred pipe. Source: Image No. NPG.93.133, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.)

    Potential Prehistory

    Historian of science Lukas Rieppel considers the connections between geology, prehistory, and imperialism, as part of the "Unlearning Imperialism" Verso roundtable.

  • Different African Objects (Source: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936. Photo: Suichi Sunami)

    Unlearning Imperialism: A Verso Roundtable

    A Verso roundtable on Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's Potential History, discussing imperial knowledge, history, art, the possibility of repairing devastated worlds, and above all: what can a radical practice of history look like?

  • From Foster's 1899 The Races of Europe

    Race, Racism, and Racecraft

    Racecraft is not a euphemistic substitute for racism. It is a kind of fingerprint evidence that racism has been on the scene. 
     

  • Sicily as Autonomous Community

    Sicily as Autonomous Community

    In The Invention of Sicily, Jamie Mackay offers a sweeping history of Sicily from ancient times to the present day. Mackay presents Sicily's history as one of an autonomous community fighting for liberation against their oppressors.