Category: Past SHS Meetings
The Fiery Spirits: Popular Protest, Parliament and the English Revolution
A Socialist History Society public on-line meeting held on Tuesday 17 March 2026
Speaker: John Rees
The thrilling history of Parliament’s ‘fiery spirits’, whose actions led to the defeat of Charles I in the English Civil War and paved the way for the execution of the King in 1649
The Fiery Spirits tells the story of the MPs in parliament and the protestors in the streets who played a pivotal role in the English Civil Wars. Read on ...
Christopher Hill: the life of a radical historian
Speaker: Michael Braddick
A Socialist History Society on-line meeting on 7 October 2025
Christopher Hill was one of the leading historians of his generation. His work across more than fifteen books and dozens of articles fundamentally rewrote the way we understand the English Revolution and the development of the modern British state. Read on ...
Aimé Césaire and Martinique
Socialist History online public meeting on 19 May 2025
Speaker Kevin Morgan
In October 1956 Aimé Césaire announced his resignation from the French communist party in an open letter to the PCF’s leader Maurice Thorez. Better known as a writer and co-architect of the concept of negritude, Césaire was a communist of eleven years’ standing and one of two PCF deputies representing Martinique in the French national assembly. Read on ...
The Left and CND
Martin Shaw will talk about his new book The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Agenda Publishing), a history of the antinuclear movement in Britain up to the present day. In the late 1950s, this was the first mass protest movement of the postwar period and proved seminal for the antiwar and social movements which followed, which in turn profoundly influenced its second big wave in the 1980s.
Read on ...