Just over thirty years ago the world woke up to the news that in Chiapas, South East Mexico a revolution had occurred. The Zapatistas rose up in January 1994 against 500 years of injustice and oppression of indigenous peoples, against neo-liberal economics and specifically the Mexican government’s recent signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) entered the largest city in the state, San Cristobal, and briefly took another six […]
In 2012, during the early days of the Syrian Civil War, three mainly Kurdish regions in north-east Syria were able to overthrow and remove the Assad regime through revolutionary action. Over the next years these regions would work with other parts of northern Syrian society and form the Movement for a Democratic Society. Its core values are for grassroots democracy, women's liberation, and ecology. By 2014, this revolutionary movement and its armed defence forces, known as the YPG and the YPJ at […]
The Bristol Radical History Group has produced seventy publications, mostly within the Radical Pamphleteer series, with several more pending. These honour and continue the tradition of the troublesome chapbooks, broadsides, and seditious tracts from the earliest days of mass printing. The series was launched in 2008, with Mark Steeds’ Cry Freedom, Cry Seven Stars, a tribute to the anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson, active in Bristol during the 18th century. Since then, a collection of […]
In April 1986, a group of women drawn together by their experiences of trauma, self injury and punitive psychiatric treatment started the Bristol Crisis Service for Women. An explicitly feminist user-led and volunteer-run listening service for women suffering mental health crises, it offered callers space to talk about their pain and how they endured it. Through listening without judgment, BCSW showed women a solidarity they had rarely experienced. Amplifying their voices, it began to forcefully […]
The fight for union rights. In the early twentieth century, workers could be sacked by their employer with impunity simply because they had joined a trade union. Such was the situation for those who worked on Bristol’s trams. In Trouble on the Trams, Rob Whitfield recounts how the drivers and conductors fought back when nearly one hundred of their number were dismissed in 1901. Using contemporary newspaper reports and the company’s own records, he details this dispute and those that were to […]
This 70-page booklet, City Pit: memoirs of a Speedwell miner, tells the story of Fred Moss who lived and worked in east Bristol as a collier in several different pits. Fred starts his story as a boy, telling of a strong community, living difficult hard lives but with sturdy solidarity in the face of adversity. He describes the benefits of mutual aid and respect in an area dominated by mining and associated trades, in a community which has largely passed and is now a historical memory. He […]
On a wet and windy night on the 4th January 2024, upto 200 people attended the first Bristol Allotmenteers Resist! public campaign meeting, at St Werburgh's community centre. By 7.05pm it was standing room only. By 7.20pm I was up at the front, with old pal Mike Feingold, the respected local food grower and permaculture teacher. We had 10 minutes max between us, and Mike was going to talk on his 30yrs of allotment experience in Bristol. We'd agreed that I would, quite literally, do '1000 years […]
Not A BRHG Event
BRHG are very pleased to announce that as part of LGBTQ+ History Month 2024 Mike Richardson will be speaking about the 'people's lawyer' Hugh Holmes Gore, the subject of his excellent book. Anglo – Catholic convert to the left, Hugh Holmes Gore, was a key figure in Bristol’s labour movement during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Gore linked Clifton Christian Socialists, morally concerned about the poverty and suffering caused by economic depression, with the working class […]
J. W. Arrowsmith Ltd, 1855–1927 Deference and Dissent provides a window into the working lives of compositors, letterpress machinists, and bookbinders and their relationships with their employer. It looks at their collective voice, disputes, strikes, workplace culture, mechanisation of typesetting, as well as the impact of other significant factors such as the First World War and the economic slump in the early 1920s. Mike Richardson’s work contributes to understanding the complexity of the […]
Not A BRHG Event
Time for some seasonal solidarity! A fundraiser for Bristol's Kill The Bill prisoners, hosted by the Justice for Bristol Protesters campaign, with all proceeds going to the Bristol ABC prisoner support fund (online donations here). Featuring two live bands, dj, prisoners art & poems, films, and live art from the Bristol Mural Collective. Info, tickets, and band videos from Headfirst here. Or rock up and pay (cash if possible) on the door! Strange Brew is a multi-room DIY art space / music […]
