Sam Wetherell

Sam Wetherell

@samwetherell.bsky.social

Historian of Britain and the World at the University of York. Interested in cities, art-making and the future. Liverpool and the Un-Making of Britain out now: www.samwetherell.com

2,395 Followers 593 Following 725 Posts Joined Jul 2023
11 hours ago

Cool, does this mean another decade of relentless, hopeless political nihilism, infrastructural decline and environmental degradation then?

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1 day ago

Come to hear me talk to the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire about Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

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1 day ago

Later today.

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2 days ago

Liverpool friends - I’m giving this talk on Wednesday!

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4 days ago

bro its ok just one more enactment, just one more attempt to master the horror of vulnerability to mass trauma by perpetrating it ourselves, just one time and the repressed will never return again, we fuckin got this bro

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5 days ago
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It is always worth reading Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi's extraordinary writings on Iran. But this one is particularly urgent. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...

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6 days ago
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Failed asylum seeker families to be offered up to £40k to leave The home secretary says the

This morning in seminar I was explaining to students that a key difference between Enoch Powell and mainstream 1960s Tories was his plan for financing re-emigration. An hour later a student put her hand up and told us all that this had just been announced. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

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1 week ago

Also can anyone recommend anything something and student-friendly written about Britain's postwar relationship with Iran, particularly (but not necessarily limited to) the 1953 coup?

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1 week ago
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Trump on Starmer: 'Not Winston Churchill that we're dealing with' President Donald Trump criticised Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the UK's initial response to US-Israeli strikes on Iran.

He's literally right, in the sense that Churchill, as Air Minister, was one of the pioneers of indiscriminate arial bombing in the middle east in 1919. www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/...

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1 week ago

What if the David Abulafia bot is the Skynet style singularity tipping point? Vast hulking killing machines burning down the earth to source barely coherent content for Spectator columns. Levelling cities to eradicate wokeness. Maybe that already happened some years ago?

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1 week ago

What if the David Abulafia bot is the Skynet style singularity tipping point? Vast hulking killing machines burning down the earth to source barely coherent content for Spectator columns. Levelling cities to eradicate wokeness. Maybe that already happened some years ago?

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1 week ago

David Abulafia: [ad infinitum] Have you considered prefacing this piece of writing with a slurry of racist diatribes?

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1 week ago
“I Am Not Anti Black Music But …”: Popular Music, the NME, and Race in Late Twentieth-Century Britain | Journal of British Studies | Cambridge Core “I Am Not Anti Black Music But …”: Popular Music, the NME, and Race in Late Twentieth-Century Britain - Volume 65

Very much looking forward to reading and assigning this - @benjamin-bland.bsky.social's new article on music as a site of racial formation (rather than liberal integration) in modern Britain: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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1 week ago
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Oil, Nationalism and British Policy in Iran As new nations were formed from the declining British Empire, a murky world of diplomats, oil executives and spies were determined to maintain London's grip on…

By a PhD pal of mine www.bloomsbury.com/uk/oil-natio...

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1 week ago

Also can anyone recommend anything something and student-friendly written about Britain's postwar relationship with Iran, particularly (but not necessarily limited to) the 1953 coup?

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1 week ago
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Refugee status to be temporary as Shabana Mahmood rips up rules on UK asylum Home secretary announces 30-month protection limit, with refugees required to leave if their home countries are later judged safe

Labour "shifting left" update: Agreeing to participate in a massive destabilising regional war while, *the same hour* announcing tighter border restrictions to limit future refugees from the same war. Somehow both infinitely barbaric and breathlessly provincial. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

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1 week ago
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As I knew it would be, it is just so fucking funny reading these posts today. Toeing this line, to the point of alleged electoral fraud, is the tactical equivalent of putting your entire head inside the cannon to make sure its working as the fuse ticks down.

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1 week ago

Not to mention flooding the public sphere with nonsense, reactionary sensational garbage about drug decriminalisation.

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1 week ago

I have deleted to be safe. The image of the van in the original tweet likely depicts Labour canvasser with a Labour sticker. It could be some crank but its in line with a) Labour's bizarre enthusiasm for committing fraud in this election and b) their absurd hard right recent messaging.

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1 week ago

Source seems fairly legit. Also pretty li line with their recent message - that attack video etc… happy to be proven wrong of course I’ll keep an eye on original source x.com/turnleftmedi... a

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1 week ago

A political project pitched to a pliant media as one that would fundamentally remake a nation in terminal decline in a ten year phase of government, resorting now simply to repeating "they want to smoke drugs!" in an increasingly panicked voice.

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2 weeks ago
Guilty Secrets: Deceit, Denial, and the Discovery of Kenya's 'Migrated Archive' on JSTOR David M. Anderson, Guilty Secrets: Deceit, Denial, and the Discovery of Kenya's 'Migrated Archive', History Workshop Journal, No. 80 (AUTUMN 2015), pp. 142-160

This is slightly more recent. Can't remember if it was written after the transfer or not. www.jstor.org/stable/43917...

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2 weeks ago
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‘Apply the Flame More Searingly’: The Destruction and Migration of the Archives of British Colonial Administration: A Southeast Asia Case Study In 2011, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office formally acknowledged that it held records of local colonial administration that had been removed from their repositories prior to independence and eve...

Teaching this today. If I had an infinite budget I've always thought the best way to teach students about British archives, power and decolonisation would be to give them 1 million sheets of paper and tell them they have a week to destroy them all with no a trace.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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2 weeks ago
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From @jonathanliew.bsky.social’s thoughtful piece on Goodwin and Gorton and Denton. It is so obvious that the catastrophe of Reform is in part a response to Labour’s desperate lack of political imagination. Farage will be Starmer’s primary political legacy. www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

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2 weeks ago
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a woman is ice skating on a rink with the olympic rings behind her ALT: a woman is ice skating on a rink with the olympic rings behind her

My three year old twenty minutes after I’ve called nursery to say she is too sick to come in, then cancelled all my work meetings.

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3 weeks ago

Two times this week my three year old has done this incredibly adorable, hilarious thing where she wakes up for no reason for the day at 3am.

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3 weeks ago
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3 weeks ago

What America did through ideology, the UK does in order to get a budget projection that we don't even really care about

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3 weeks ago

Congrats Theo great to see this out in the world!

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3 weeks ago
‘Inside the belly of the monster’: The politics of race in Britain, transnational anti-colonialism, and the Black Liberation Front | Journal of Global History | Cambridge Core ‘Inside the belly of the monster’: The politics of race in Britain, transnational anti-colonialism, and the Black Liberation Front

Just published open access in @globalhistjnl.bsky.social

‘Inside the belly of the monster’: The politics of race in Britain, transnational anti-colonialism, and the Black Liberation Front

doi.org/10.1017/S174...

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