Radical Women at Working Class Library

RADICAL WOMEN:  1880-1914 CONFERENCE Saturday 17 September  9.30am-4pm This one-day conference will celebrate the battles and achievements of working-class women in the drive to achieve a fairer and more balanced society. The decades spanning the turn of the twentieth century saw an upsurge in female activism as women began to organise themselves into trade unions, take part in the socialist debates on social and economic change, and demand the vote. Radical women not only battled against the gender- conservative males within their family or community but also those who claimed to be fighting for equality. There will be keynote addresses by Professor Sheila Rowbotham, University of Manchester and Professor Karen Hunt, Keele University. Papers include the Cabin Restaurant waitresses strike of 1908; the life of Crewe tailoress, campaigner, activitist and author Ada Neild Chew; the forgotten history of domestic servants in women’s suffrage; radical women and the bicycle; suffragette Constance Lytton # and the cause of prison reform; plus many more. Full programme details:  http://www.wcml.org.uk/whats-on/events/radical-women-18801914/. Tickets: £20 (£7.50 unwaged) including lunch and refreshments Book in advance from trustees@wcml.org.uk Saturday Library Opening  Don't forget we're open on the first Saturday of most months - the next one is Saturday 6 August 2016,  10am to 4pm. FREE TALK Wednesday 14th September 2pm  Pit Props: music, international solidarity and the 1984/85 miners' strike A new book from the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, edited by Granville Williams, marks the end of an era in coal mining in the UK and highlights how the year-long struggle by the miners in defence of jobs and communities still resonates today. Details here. This free talk is part of our autumn Invisible Histories series. All welcome.   EXHIBITION 'We Only Want the Earth' 28 September - early 2017 On the centenary of the Easter Rising an exhibition exploring the life of one of its leaders, James Connolly, will be on display here at the Library.    No Power on Earth - Living History performance Based on the true story of Salford man, James Hudson, this monologue tells the story of an ordinary school teacher at the start of the First World War who finds himself at odds with the popular mood. The story, written by Sue Reddish, celebrates his courage to stay true to his beliefs despite considerable pressure, and asks the audience to consider what they would do in such a circumstance. This was performed at both the Library and in local schools earlier this year. The script is now available for download from this page on our website. Although the copyright is ours, we would be delighted if others use it and put on their own performances; just let us know so we can help publicise it.   CALLS FOR PAPERS  Radical Footnotes Radical Footnotes is an independent typographic space committed to bring forward the printed expression of the Working Class. Call for proposals: submit a short discourse addressing problems, analyzing developments, points of contention, methodologies, approaches and insights concerning: ‘DAS KAPITAL’ the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its publication Deadline: December 2016 Details here http://www.socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/308422 The Women and Girls of Crewe, the North of England, and Beyond 1880-2016 One Day Conference - Wednesday 7th, December 2016 Manchester Metropolitan University, Crewe  Proposals are invited for this free one day interdisciplinary conference inspired by the life and works of the suffragist, author and labour rights campaigner Ada Nield Chew and the forthcoming centenary of the Representation of the People Act. Deadline: 7 August 2016 Details here: http://www.localyouthengagement.org/uncategorized/call-for-papers/

follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend  Copyright © 2016 Working Class Movement Library, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: Working Class Movement Library 51 The Crescent, Salford, M5 4WX United Kingdom Add us to your address book *|ELSE:|* Copyright © 2016 Working Class Movement Library, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: Working Class Movement Library 51 The Crescent Salford, M5 4WX

World War I & the job of the historian

Adam Hochschild's interview with Stephen Jackson:              

Renowned author Adam Hochschild’s most recent work To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) presented a heartbreaking tale of the mass slaughter of the First World War and a sympathetic portrayal of those who opposed the conflict. In this Q&A, he gives his thoughts on the book and offers his perspective on the role of the publicly engaged historian. 

Stephen Jackson: What was it about the subject that inspired you to write it, and what would you argue was your most important contribution to the historical discussion on the First World War?

Adam Hochschild: I’ve always been deeply fascinated by those who resisted the First World War, ever since I read a biography of Bertrand Russell as a teenager, and then later Sheila Rowbotham’s work on Alice Wheeldon. To have had the courage to speak out so boldly when there was such jingoism in the air deeply impressed me.  I also found a very strong echo in those times of something I had been deeply involved in:  the movement against the Vietnam War here in the United States.  Then, too, a war divided members of families from each other; hence I was intrigued to see the divided families of Britain in 1914–1918, and used that as a narrative structure for my book.  In the Vietnam era, too, we had an epidemic of government spying on citizens—when much later, using the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to get the records of surveillance on me by the FBI, CIA and military intelligence, they amounted to more than 100 pages – and I was a very small fish in that movement.  Hence it fascinated me to read the government surveillance records from Scotland Yard and military intelligence on the UK dissenters of 1914–1918.  I felt I was seeing at work the same mindset as that of the FBI agents who reported on me.

 

I’m by no means the first person to write about those brave British dissenters.  I certainly hope my book, and those of others, helps put them in the foreground as we remember the war. Paradoxically, most people today would agree that the First World War remade the world for the worse in almost every conceivable way, yet all our traditional ways of remembering it – parades, monuments, museums, military cemeteries – celebrate those who fought and not those who refused to fight.

 

Stephen Jackson: In the years since the publication of the work, what sort of feedback from the scholarly community and the general public did you receive?  How do you think that contemporary events, especially a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, shaped the response to your work?

Adam Hochschild:  I’ve always believed that you can write for a general audience and at the same time meet the highest scholarly standards for accuracy and the documenting of sources. This book got good reviews and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; at the same time many university history departments have been kind to me.  I was writer-in-residence at the history department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst this past spring and will be doing a speaking tour of some half dozen campuses in the US and Europe this fall, talking about the war.

 

I’ve also heard from several descendants of people mentioned in the book – one of the great pleasures of writing history, I’ve found.  And sometimes, unexpectedly, I’ve heard from other people as well who are connected to this patch of history.  After the book came out, an American mining company official whom I’d met a few years before in a godforsaken village in eastern Congo, wrote me that in 1917 his grandfather, a conscientious objector, had been hanged in effigy in his home town in Iowa.

 

And yes, I think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan show what tragic mistakes one can make by not studying history more closely.  How similar the illusion of President George W. Bush when he landed on that aircraft carrier in 2003 in front of the sign 'Mission Accomplished' to the illusion of Kaiser Wilhelm II when he told his troops in August, 1914:  'You will be home before the leaves fall from the trees.'

 

Stephen Jackson: This year marks the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.  What do you think is or should be the place of conscientious objectors and leftist anti-war activists in the public memory of World War I?

Adam Hochschild: None of these people were perfect, but on the central issue of their time, they were essentially right, and should be honored.  Harry Patch, the last British veteran of the war to die – 5 years ago, at 111 – said it best: the war 'was not worth it.  It was not worth one life, let alone all the millions.'

 

Stephen Jackson: How can scholars teaching undergraduate or graduate courses in British History or Modern European History incorporate non-traditional themes such as anti-war activism into lessons on the Great War?

Adam Hochschild: There are rich primary sources: the writings and speeches of outspoken war opponents, like Bertrand Russell and E.D. Morel in Britain, or Jane Addams and Eugene V. Debs in the United States.  Periodicals that these anti-war movements published. Letters and memoirs by war resisters who went to prison, not just in the U.S. and Britain, but in other countries as well. I hope someone is thinking of pulling a collection of material like this together into a reader!  And there are fine secondary sources as well. That list could be a long one, but I’ll just mention Jo Vellacott’s Bertrand Russell and the Pacifists in the First World War, a careful, well-written book I learned a lot from.

 

Stephen Jackson: The 19^th century German historian Leopold von Ranke famously said historians can 'merely tell how it really was,' and should not judge the past nor attempt to give moral guidance for the present.   To End All Wars, and your work more generally, compellingly does just that. How would you describe your underlying philosophy for writing history?  What role do you think that the historian — as an historian — should play in engaging in contemporary political and ethical discussions?

Adam Hochschild:  Well, I’m certain in favor of telling it how it was – and with the highest possible standards of accuracy. In real life, seldom are one’s heroes totally heroic or one’s villains totally villainous.  In To End All Wars, for instance, the fiery pacifist Charlotte Despard had a kind of knee-jerk far-left reaction to everything that would have made her difficult to talk to, although I agree with her about the war.  But her brother, Field Marshal Sir John French, though he exemplified the worst type of unthinking generalship in the field, seems to have been a warm-hearted person of great charm whom it would have been delightful to spend an evening with. One should enjoy such paradoxes and not try to deny them.

 

But beyond that, I think sometimes an historian can provide something that’s relevant to contemporary political discussions without having to hit people over the head with it. In my book, for example, I don’t talk about the Iraq or Afghanistan wars.  But whenever I give a talk about the First World War, the first question anybody asks is:  do you see an analogy?