Now it has a website and is available to pre-order I'm so excited to announce that my second book — Liverpool and the Un-Making of Britain — will be out next spring with Bloomsbury/
@HoZ_Books
!
So glad this library e-reader periodically logs me out in case someone breaks into my house, clubs me to death, and then proceeds to learn about history for free.
Eric Hobsbawm: "The history of the frame-breaking in the East Midlands hosiery trade is too well-known to need re-telling." Me: *nodding* yes, of course.
Britain is culturally, politically and architecturally in denial about the fact that it has become a hot country and that it’s gong to get much hotter.
Thinking about so many British academics of my generation who will only have a tiny window between paying off their New Labour student loans and retiring on a minuscule pension, and how we have been fucked from start to finish by the marketisation and denigration of universities.
Very sad to hear about the passing of David Graeber. Today is a good day to read his beautiful essay on why we are not living in the future we expected to be living in:
British milennial friends - what was the name for the subculture at your school that combined skateboarding, baggy clothes, disaffection, and consumption of the 1999-2004 wave of rap metal? In Milton Keynes it was "greebo", a word that has been totally annihilated from history.
Learning that CLR James wrote a bizarre book-long Marxist exposition of Moby Dick then tried to argue in court when threatened with deportation that his analysis of Melville was so astute he should immediately be granted US citizenship. Magnificent energy.
Britain in 1955: We will burn millions of documents relating to imperial atrocities to keep them secret from postcolonial leaders.
Britain in 2024: We regret to inform you that due to a cyber attack, no one will ever be able to read the papers of the East India Company again.
On picket lines, in teach outs and the discussions in between I have seen, the first time ever, a vision emerge of the kind of public, democratic university I'd like to work at. Tuition fees, alienated teaching practices, casualization and REF should now all be on the table.
Until yesterday my most financially devastating afternoon was when I lost a train ticket at the station in York and had to pay full fare to London. Then a parliament of millionaire Vice-Chancellors stole tens of thousands of pounds from myself and all my colleagues...
In 1971 the Post Office deemed that post-war university buildings were architecturally and culturally significant enough that they should appear on stamps. Four were issued: Aberystwyth, Southampton, Leicester and Essex.
Idea for a TV series in which a historian forms a detective agency to prove that eight specific people are dead so that he can legally photograph a bundle of papers in the National Library of Wales.
Just learned about a great great uncle of mine who vomited so forcefully of a boat in 1912 that he fell into the sea and drowned. Truly a Wetherell death for the ages.
We are overwhelmed with joy to announce that our remarkable daughter Charlie Wetherell Jewell was born yesterday morning.
@hcjewell
is well and morale is high. Midwives should be the highest paid members of our society.
What do people think Britain was doing in terms of border control during the interwar period? This entire debate is taking place as if Britain doesn't have its own history of twentieth century racialised border violence. Some readings on the border in the early 20th century:
When I moved back to Britain it felt like academics had lost a war long ago and were completely and utterly defeated. The way that the REF, low pay, constant admin and a denigration of meaningful pedagogy is seen as a fact of nature is stunning.
I am delighted to announce that after many years and with the help and support of so many people, my book 'Foundations' will be released in the Fall with
@PrincetonUPress
. There's no cover art yet, but here's a thread with some of the images in the book:
As Battersea power station reopens this weekend as a securitized complex of luxury flats and restaurants amidst a massive energy and housing crisis, let’s remember when its surplus heat was recycled to warm Churchill Gardens, a council estate across the river.
With a few seats left to declare, Labour on track to receive fewer total votes than they did in 2019. Austerity, migrant bashing and authoritarianism made a more efficient (older, wealthier, whiter, more suburban) distribution of seats, but no one can tell you it is more popular.
My main concern for 2020: will I write a book proposal? My main concern for 2021: Will the mutation of the deadly airborne tropical bat virus into a more contagious strain cancel indoor teaching or will they still claim that the rooms are 100% secure because the window is open?
No matter how powerful the right are or how complete their control over every branch of government, "the state" will so often be construed as a set of cultural norms held by a scattered, disorganised and completely powerless left opposition.
Solidarity with the thousands of Berkeley students who have had their university offer rescinded because of the ridiculous whims of millionaire homeowners.
Regardless of everything else, the fact that the Tories can be directly responsible for one of the worst covid responses of any developed country on earth and massively increase their electoral support should sound real alarm bells for the current state of British democracy.
This anecdote about Joe Biden changing the subject from Ukraine by producing volume after volume of his late mother's anti-English poetry has made my day.
In the space of 13 months, the small, damp 2 bedroom terrace house with mould, no dishwasher no drier and a broken bathtub that we have been renting (and are now leaving) in York has increased from £800 to £1800.
I wrote a piece about British food and the history of the climate crisis for
@tribunemagazine
reviewing Chris Otter's fabulously strange book Diet for a Large Planet.
Little known fact, in 1978, before the great environmental historian William Cronon wrote Nature's Metropolis (and Changes in the Land) he did a PhD at Oxford, where he wrote a wildly ahead-of-its-time environmental history of Coventry (never published). 1/6
Like all academics in Britain I am forced as part of my job to record the precise movements of overseas students on certain visas in paperwork that can be accessed by the Home Office. Is that a chilling instance of campus unfreedom too?
Hugely excited that York are offering six fully funded PhD places reserved for students from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds. Come work with us! Share widely! And if you're interested in applying in the history dept. then I'd happy to chat.
Looking forward to Britain distributing the vaccine in the most stupid, culturally specific, in-jokey way possible, like by nectar points or Duke of Edinburgh awards or via Mumsnet. Or it will be denied to people who don't take their bins out properly.
I'm giving a public lecture in DC next week which gives me an excuse show a picture of probably my favourite ever figure from a monograph. "The Crisis of the British Face" from Chris Otter's Magnificent 'Diet for a Large Planet' on the consequences of industrialised food.
Nothing like being back at the National Archives to remind yourself that 40% of the archival content of Britain's modern imperial history is just little slips of paper thanking people for their letters or memos.
🚨 | NEW: Angela Rayner pins the blame on Sadiq Khan for Labour narrowly missing out on Uxbridge
“The decision in Uxbridge was related to Ulez. The Uxbridge result shows that when you don’t listen to the voters, you don’t win elections.”
It’s almost as if Britain’s largely unchallenged cross-party consensus on fiscal restraint in the face of a massive public sector crisis is a parochial and mostly false set of talking points.
Face to face teaching in Britain needs to be cancelled immediately, right now, today, before students start moving across the country. This is a disaster that is only heading in one direction and we have the time, right now, to stop it.
Impossible to believe this actually happened! Thanks so much to everyone who helped along the way. The plan is to have a launch in the spring if and when it's safe to do so. In the meantime here, is a thread with some of my favourite images from the book:
Princeton University Press @princetonupress.bsky.s
Happy Pub Day to Foundations, the first comprehensive and academic history of Britain's modern built environment. Pick up a copy here and learn how the built environment shaped the nation’s politics.
@samwetherell
To believe that this is the case you have to wilfully, *strenuously* repress almost everything about Labour's postwar history. It is an absurd claim for a Labour politician to make, and its *wild* that it goes unchallenged by a senior political journalist.
Interesting to hear Jonathan Reynolds on
@TimesRadio
talking honestly about how there have previously been “no go areas” for Labour which the party has been working to change. Focus on immigration this week is the start
I wrote an article about my settler colonial family in Australia and New Zealand and their bizarre history of strange accidents and darkly comic deaths.
A nice article here in the FT which reviews my book along with a handful of others. (Also, I apologise for a few weeks of book tweets coming down the line... Nice things come rarely in academia!)
What is happening how, however abhorrent, is not an exceptional thing that stands outside of British and certainly not British imperial history. It may well be "fascist", but its a homegrown fascism which deep historical roots.
Absolutely over the moon that Foundations has won the Historians of British Art book award for scholarship on a contemporary period - and to be in such wonderful company!
Finally got hold of my own paperback copy of Foundations! And the great news is that it’s also delicious! Order from
@PrincetonUPress
here. If you want a copy but can’t afford it drop me a line.
These fascists are responding to the very clear signals broadcast by both major parties about the racial hierarchies of human life in Britain and across the world.
The scenes in Rotherham aren’t a protest, they aren’t even a far right riot, they are an ongoing attempt to murder the men, women & children inside by burning them alive.
The stench of these days will hang around those who incited and justified it for the rest of their lives.
This is such a classically British view of politics - that any viewpoint or argument is only meaningful and valid if it is in step with what is imagined to be the view of a “majority of the public.”
If my phone in on
@lbc
yesterday is a good measure, the majority of the public are either not really arsed about these ads or cautiously supportive of them. The condemnation across media/here on Twitter (which I totally understand, btw) appears to be out of step….
At the moment the Guardian Football Weekly Podcast is like that radio station that kept playing the metronome during the siege of Leningrad in 1943. Please don't stop
@maxrushden
and
@bglendenning
- even if there is no football for a while...
This footage of dozens of armed police in riot gear raiding an academic office in Columbia piled high with books is going to be playing as b-roll in my mind for weeks.
And here you can see officers entering an academic building with their weapons drawn, in response to college students protesting their tax & tuition dollars contributing to a plausible genocide
This review of Britain's transphobic pseudo-philosophers by the amazing
@graceelavery
is essential because it is devastating and funny but also because it exposes the terrifying shallowness and vapidity of Britain's political and intellectual culture.
Today, after years of trying and failing to learn how to drive, set back by the pandemic, I finally passed my test (albeit in the US where it is really quite shamefully easy). For closure's sake, here is a thread of all of my miserable tweets about learning how to drive:
The tragedy of having to cite something from page 30 of a preface of a book, means that people will forever see a reference to page "xxx" and assume that I forgot to write in the page.
I wish British newspapers reported on Britain the way the New York Times does, and that the New York Times reported on the US the same way it reports on Britain.
Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, which will involve elaborate processions, vigils and rituals, will be paid for by British taxpayers as they deal with soaring energy prices and high inflation. The British government has not yet said how much it will cost.
There's a 50% sale at
@PrincetonUPress
, which means that for just £11 you can buy my book Foundations and learn how British cities were dramatically modernised then ruthlessly privatised in the twentieth century. An image from each chapter below:
My new article, “Sowing Seeds" is has now been published with
@JBritishStudies
! It's about how spectacular "garden festivals" initiated a new environmental, economic and social order in neoliberal British cities. Here's a thread about what this means:
Wonderful to see that a day of sustained pressure has forced Sheffield Uni to back down from its absurd, revolting policy of docking pay for striking lecturers who don't reschedule classes. Makes me continue to believe that bigger victories are possible!
Solidarity with York's archeology department who were targeted last week by the Daily Mail over a pointless, confected article about content warnings. I urge everyone to read this excellent response by my fantastic colleague Colleen Morgan:
In 1910, the directors of the Royal Liver Assurance Company in Liverpool ate lunch off of a vast face of a clock that would be installed the Liver Building, their new headquarters.
Imagine you are esteemed intellectual historian Jonathan Israel and you’ve just finished your life’s work, a 1400 page biography of Spinoza and instead of a blurb OUP make you have a bulletpoint list of interventions. All I’m saying is no one is safe from UK academia vibes.
Hoping that a journalist with a remaining scrap of dignity asks Starmer what "gender ideology" means at some point before the election but not really holding out hope.
I feel like one of the things that allowed the Queen to have such a powerful/weird emotional hold was that the office was feminised and thus made more safe. There is a whole different affective landscape to "King" - a blunt and uncomfortable feeling of authority.
I wrote an essay for
@RENEWALjournal
about the racial segregation of housing in postwar Britain and about how "redlining" might be a useful term for thinking about Britain as well as the United States.
A lot of EP Thompson tweets for his 100th birthday. My contribution is this extraordinary moment of lucidity and honest in the conclusion to Whigs and Hunters.