The Society takes an interest in every aspect of human history from the earliest social formations to modern society, its culture and political activities. We encourage anyone with an interest in our history to join us and participate in our activities. The Society is particularly interested in the struggles of labour, women, progressive and peace movements throughout the world, as well as the movements and achievements of working class communities, colonial peoples, black people, and other oppressed groups seeking social justice, human dignity and liberation.
The eminent historian, Professor Paul Preston, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Spanish Civil War. He is the author of numerous books on modern Spain, the Spanish Republic, the war and its aftermath. Read on ...
The tale of a notorious 1911 London gunfight, the ‘Siege of Sidney Street’, and its consequences.
On 3 January 1911, in the heart of London’s mainly Jewish East End, police discovered Latvian revolutionaries wanted for the murder of three officers. Read on ...
Speaker is Cathy Porter, author of a new biography of Larisa Reisner
‘She burst across the revolutionary sky like a blazing meteor, dazzling all in her path,’ Trotsky wrote. For the poet Boris Pasternak, she was Lara, the heroine of his novel Doctor Zhivago. Commissar, revolutionary fighter, espionage agent, journalist, Larisa Reisner (1895–1926) was a model for the ‘new woman’ of the Russian Revolution, and one of its most popular and brilliant writers, whose works were published in mass editions and read by millions. Read on ...
During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Read on ...
An on-line talk to mark the anniversary of the publication of History and Class Consciousness
Speaker Andrew Feenberg
The initial reception of Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness was almost entirely negative. Non-Marxists didn’t like his Marxism and Marxist disliked his borrowings from contemporary social science and philosophy. From 1923, when the book was first published, until the 1960s when a new generation of readers discovered it, History and Class Consciousness largely disappeared from both history and consciousness. Read on ...