Great Britain Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

Winston Churchill’s North American Tour

In the summer of 1929, the future prime minister almost quit politics

March 30, 2021 • by Josh Ireland

_____ One night in the summer of 1929, Winston Churchill, who was staying in a bungalow owned by William Randolph Hearst, was horrified to see a bulky figure clambering through his window. The intruder, Winston realized, was his son Randolph, who seemed equally startled. Randolph had expected to find Hearst’s daughter-in-law, who ...

Activism

From Mad Cows to Coronavirus

When Government Fails, Grassroots Activism Flourishes

March 17, 2020 • by Sidney Tarrow

This was bad enough; but in March 1996, Britain’s secretary of state for health announced ten cases of something similar in another species: a new form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) had been diagnosed in human patients. CJD is a fatal disease caused by a rampant protein that eats away the brain cells ...

Democracy

Hong Kong on the Brink

March 3, 2020 • by Jeffrey Wasserstrom

The irony of the UK, one of the world's great democracies, belatedly handing over a colonized people from one distant ruler to another, in Beijing, was not lost on the people living nearly 2,000km south of China's capital. It is hard to say how genuine Margaret Thatcher's claimed optimism at the ...

History

The Rastafari in Britain

Writing Community-Engaged History

February 17, 2020 • by Aleema Gray

When future generations study the pages of history, seeking to understand the growth and development of black community histories, what will they find? Will they remember a history that contributed to our understandings of dominant ideologies and visions of social change? Or will they recall its failures, and its inability ...

History

‘Scenarios of Uncertainty’ in Britain’s steel communities

January 20, 2020 • by Tosh Warwick

In November 2019, it was announced that the most recent manifestation of ‘British Steel’ had been saved following the purchase of the ailing firm by the Chinese Jingye Group. The £70m takeover promises to save thousands of jobs and bring in £1 billion investment. The news brought relief for those ...

‘Scenarios of Uncertainty’ in Britain’s steel communities

Politics

The Prime Minister Versus History

How Boris Johnson misrepresented the United Kingdom’s past to present himself as its political heir

November 25, 2019 • by Alistair Somerville

This is an updated version of an article published at Public Seminar on July 30, 2019. Politicians like to tell stories about themselves. Leaders like to tell stories about their country. The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is the first since Winston Churchill with both a prominent personal story and his ...

Politics

The New Prime Minister Versus History

How Boris Johnson misrepresented the United Kingdom’s past to present himself as its political heir

July 30, 2019 • by Alistair Somerville

What do Johnson’s methods of storytelling and the content of his tales tell us about the man and the prospects for his premiership? To many on this side of the Atlantic, he is simply an enigmatic buffoon — little more than a jumped up Trump mini-me with a plummier accent. ...

Feature

Brexit, Dark Money and Big Data

An investigation into the financing of Brexit

February 3, 2019 • by Adam Ramsay

An investigation by openDemocracy into the financing of the Brexit campaign in 2016 has raised far-reaching questions about connections between neoliberal elites, the tech industry and the private intelligence sector. Adam Ramsay, one of the journalists involved, summarizes a story vital to understanding how Britain has ended up where it ...

Feature

In the Shadow of the Swastika

A Reply to Lindsay Parkhowell’s ‘Irony and Historical Detachment’

August 8, 2018 • by Max L. Feldman

It all started with a Facebook post. Upon arrival at London Gatwick airport, professor and Public Seminar editor Michael Weinman saw an advertisement on which someone had drawn a Swastika. Shocked, he uploaded a hastily taken photograph. One commenter argued that the Swastika should not be shocking because it is an ancient ...

Feature

Was it all futile?

Review: John Kelly’s ‘Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain’

July 14, 2018 • by Ian Birchall

Among the many moral panics aroused by Jeremy Corbyn's accession to the Labour leadership has been the return of the spectre of Trotskyism. Lord Hattersley has warned that ‘the old gang is back’, referring explicitly to the Militant grouping of the 1980s; Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson has produced ‘evidence’ ...

Feature

Allegories of America

American “Indians” and the British Imperial Imaginary

June 19, 2018 • by Robbie Richardson

I would like to discuss a statue in London which, like many things in London, is visible and yet generally unread, monument to a hazy or forgotten history: prominently placed in front of Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, completed in 1711, is an 1886 replica of a statue of Queen ...

Feature

The Risks of Others

Imperial Nostalgia and Technologies of the Financial Imagination

June 12, 2018 • by Paul Robert Gilbert

In late 2014, the East India Company opened a new luxury tea and coffee store at the Royal Exchange in the City of London. Today’s East India Company does not, however, present itself as a tea shop named after the corporation whose officers Adam Smith charged with crafting a “perfectly destructive” system ...