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.
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A. L. Morton: Life in the Radical Tradition

Speaker: James Crossley
This talk provided an overview of Morton’s life and work based on recent archival research. It covered the formative influences on Morton’s political and intellectual development and contextualise his work in light of his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Morton’s main publications will be discussed, including A People’s History of England (1938) and The English Utopia (1952), explaining the shifting emphases between the two.
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A new look at the Webbs

An on-line talk for the Socialist History Society by  Michael Ward, author of Unceasing War on Poverty : Beatrice & Sidney Webb and their World 

First broadcast on Wednesday 16 October 2024

This engaging biography of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, ‘Unceasing War on Poverty’, takes the reader into the world of the Webbs, the remarkable couple who changed Britain, inspiring a generation to fight for a better society. Read on ...

Red Mersey

The Communist Party in Liverpool and Birkenhead, 1920-1940
SHS Occasional Publication 50

by Chris Jones

Chapters:

  • Foundation: a party of a new type
  • The Minority Movement in Liverpool
  • Bans and proscriptions in the Labour Party and trade unions gather pace
  • New Times and the ‘New Line’
  • Organising the CPGB: members, officers and offices
  • No Pasaran: The fight against Fascism in Liverpool
  • The Popular Front on the Mersey
  • Industrial activity of the CPGB in Liverpool
  • The cultural life of the Liverpool CPGB
  • The Life and Soul of the Party
  • Darkening Clouds: International Activity
  • Give peace a chance: Liverpool communists and peace campaigns in the 1930s

CHRIS JONES is a retired academic nurse from Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, Lancashire. Read on ...