Alex White

Taking Photos of the First Women's Liberation Conference What was it like to take photos at Britain's first Women's Liberation conference? Chandan Fraser shares her memories and pictures with us.

OTD in 1970, the first Women's Liberation Conference was held in Oxford. A watershed in the British feminist movement, attendees discussed equal pay, 24-hour childcare and free contraception.

In this piece from the archive, Chandan Fraser shares her memories of the event.

The Return of the ‘Black Peril’ In the early twentieth century, British settlers across Africa used the fear of sexual violence to justify colonial control. Joseph Abraham explores how these 'Black Perils' shape debates about migrat...

'The Return of the ‘Black Peril’', by Joseph Abraham, for @historyworkshop.org.uk.

Few in this country have worked to promote the understanding of race and class as historical phenomena in Britain as long, or as well, as Catherine Hall.

None of it is a fad. It is all politics, in the hard, real sense.

Entry on 'Propaganda' in the 'IPSA Companion to Political Science: A Practical Introduction to the 200 Most Important Concepts'

What is propaganda? And what can the 20 most cited texts in political science from the past decade teach us about it?

I address these questions in a new open access entry to IPSA Companion to Political Science.

Freely available here:
link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

The cover of the forthcoming book Colonial Negatives: Picturing History and Identity in Morocco by Patricia Goldsworthy. Bottom half of the image has an image of an oil seller in Fez surrounded by Muslim and Jewish Moroccans. The image highlights the religious diversity of the crowd, and demonstrates the dynamic nature of the Jewish district

I just got a copy of my cover for my forthcoming book! It features a postcard from Fez by the Moroccan Jewish photographer Joseph Bouhsira. Bouhsira was the first Moroccan to establish his own commercial photography studio, and many of his images featured the Jewish community in Fez.

The Seeds of Scotland’s Highland Clearances In the eighteenth century, landlords in the Scottish Highlands began to exert greater control over what their tenants planted and how they planted it. Cat Scothorne shows how these 'reforms' actually disrupted resilient ecological practices.

'Scotland’s reform-minded landlords, styling themselves as improvers, sought to reshape Highland society by controlling what their tenants planted and how they kept and processed it.'

Cat Scothorne on the tensions between capitalism and local ecological knowledge.

This was such an exciting article to edit - a history of the Highland Clearances and the sustainable customs it left behind, written (literally) from the ground up.

Malcolm had plans to raise funds for liberation movements around the world, but they were cut short by his murder. I left these out of the article - it's hard to speculate as to what could have been - but they point to his increasingly global outlook, even if it was still flawed.

He used both! From April 1964 onward, he signed letters to Muslims with el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz and to non-Muslims with Malcolm X. The OAAU magazine, Blacklash, also switches between the two.

Edward Curtis mentions one name: Khalid Ahmad Tawfiq, who studied at Al-Azhar and later founded a successor organisation to the Muslim Mosque Inc called the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood. I'm not sure about any others, but it's possible and I'd also be really curious to know about their experiences!

I definitely wouldn't expect anyone to understand those stakes from a short visit - it's more that it struck me as an example of the hazardous world Malcolm was learning to inhabit!

Great question! Malcolm's public and private writing generally frames the dispute as between a conservative and reformist Islam. He doesn't refer to the more political stakes of Egypt's rivalry with the KSA, like sponsored rebels and proxy wars in Yemen, that gave that dispute a dangerous edge.

It was such a privilege to write this. The act of building solidarities across borders is never easy, and not always successful, but has always been deeply necessary.

Malcolm X and the Difficulties of Diplomacy In 1964, the Black nationalist organizer toured Africa and the Middle East on a journey that would both transform his outlook and reveal the limits of transnational solidarity

On this day in 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated. A year earlier, his Africa-Middle East tour sought solidarity but drew him into rivalries he didn’t fully grasp, writes @alexjwhite.bsky.social 

Researching Love Letters Discover how expressions of love have been uncovered in unexpected places by The National Archive.

Learn more about the discovery process behind our current exhibition, Love Letters.
From structured research to serendipitous finds — three specialists and a volunteer share the thrill of uncovering heartfelt emotions centuries later: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-...

York History Department - Academic Jobs Uncover the past to define the future. We are seeking research-led historians to join our world-class, collaborative community. Discover career-defining opportunities within one of the UK’s most disti...

We are advertising 4 jobs at York for historians (1 year medieval, 2 years modern Britain and public history, 3 years modern China, and open ended modern Middle Eastern) features.york.ac.uk/history-jobs/

History Workshop in Turbulent Times How can history offer illumination and hope at a time of global upheaval and chaos?

What does history have to offer to a world beset by upheaval?

@lauracforster.bsky.social, @julialaite.bsky.social, Laura Schwartz, Anne Irfan and Jo Kelcey consider the complexities of this question in our new podcast 🎙️

Rethinking the ‘Bogus’ Student Throughout modern history, overseas students have neither been entirely rejected nor genuinely accepted. Nilakshi Das examines this discourse as it shifted over time.

'Changes in rhetoric exemplify the liminal position of overseas students throughout history, as they have neither been entirely rejected nor genuinely accepted'.

Nilakshi Das: 'Rethinking the "Bogus" Student'

The Return of the ‘Black Peril’ In the early twentieth century, British settlers across Africa used the fear of sexual violence to justify colonial control. Joseph Abraham explores how these 'Black Perils' shape debates about migration and security to this day.

'The language of catastrophe legitimised moral and racial exceptionalism from Notting Hill to Nairobi.'

Joseph Abraham explores how colonial anxieties about Black African men shape debates about migration and security to this day.

Fantastic opportunities here for anyone looking to pursue a PhD in Nigerian history!

Front cover of Violent Waters: Environmental Politics in Early Modern England by Elly Robson Dezateux.

Blurb of Violent Waters: How were environments and politics remade by sovereigns, floods, mapmakers, migrants, rioters, and writers during wetland improvement projects in early modern England? Violent Waters examines flagship ventures which promised to transform unruly fenland fringes into orderly terrain at the heart of national power and productivity. In practice, these projects sparked constitutional controversy, new floods, and huge riots. The first state-led project in Hatfield Level brought local, national, and transnational interests into contact and conflict for almost a century. Elly Robson Dezateux traces the environmental politics that emerged as water and land were constructed and contested, both mentally and materially. These disputes pivoted on urgent questions about risk and justice, which became entangled in civil war conflict and exposed the limits of central authority and technology. Ultimately, improvement was destabilised by a lack of legitimacy and the dynamism of local custom as a method of environmental management and collective action. Wetland communities, as much as improvers and sovereigns, remade the terrain of politics and the future of the fens.

Violent Waters: Environmental Politics in Early Modern England is out now with Cambridge University Press: www.cambridge.org/core/books/v...

This watery, riotous book has been more than a decade in the making, and I'm delighted to see it out in the world to live its own life!

Historian's Watch aims to use the past as a tool for understanding current affairs. You can read past articles using the link below, and we're always looking for pitches!

www.historyworkshop.org.uk/archive/?_se...

We've just reached another milestone - the 100th article in our Historian's Watch series! The piece is fascinating, too: it's an unflinching look at colonial anxieties about 'aggressive Black men' and how these fears became embedded in British immigration debates.

Mad Lives and Feminist History What entitles a life to a place in the annals of feminist history? Marybeth Hamilton explores the marginalisation of writer and drifter, Valerie Solanas.

What entitles a life to a place in the annals of feminist history? 

@marybethhamilton13.bsky.social explores the marginalisation of writer and drifter, Valerie Solanas.

It was a great pleasure to present my recent research "The Ottoman Empire Imagined from Africa: Visions of Tripolitan Elites for an Islamic African State under Ottoman Rule" at the Institute of Historical Research in London. There are still much to discover of the global history of Africa.

How the UK’s Propaganda Won Cold War Allies in Kenya The British Foreign Office’s secret anti-communist efforts helped to shape the country’s post-independence elites

During his 2024 visit to Kenya, King Charles acknowledged the legacy of colonialism — but only part of the story. @alexjwhite.bsky.social  examines Britain’s role in independent Kenya:

Sputnik using the abandoned frequencies is absolutely fascinating - and, as I've found in my research, has a strong precedent!

For anyone keeping track, that's another recently discontinued BBC service (defunct since 2023) brought back as an emergency lifeline. Does this kind of firing and rehiring save money on the whole or is it just driving up costs?

Thanks for writing it! The 'performative gloves' part of the original review alone annoyed me beyond words...

Who gets to tell the history of Mau Mau? David Elstein’s attack on David Olusoga’s docuseries on the legacy of the British empire reveals less about historical error than about the enduring impulse to

Brilliant article by @laurencochrane.bsky.social on why the history of the Mau Mau still attracts intense criticism - including some much-needed debunking of persistent right wing myths.

www.geeska.com/en/who-gets-...