Category Archives: Forgotten histories

A roam around my books 8 – staying power

‘There were African’s in Britain before the English came here’ is certainly a great opening line, but for me there’s nothing like a good footnote. Peter Fryer’s Staying Power is packed with them, or I should say endnotes. One hundred and … Continue reading

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A Preston egg rolling ritual and a Manchester Passion

Easter Sunday, like Christmas and New Year’s Days, is unusual in that we can count on one thing – the supermarkets will be closed. Good Friday has, in recent years, escaped this consumer curfew and nowadays is very much like … Continue reading

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A roam around my books 7 – studying the historian

I often use Wikipedia, but a search for its entry on “history” reminds me how dangerous that lazy habit can be. History is “the study of the past as it is described in written documents”. Really? Even a check of … Continue reading

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Historians make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing…

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”, Karl Marx. Edward Palmer … Continue reading

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William Wells Brown – Impressions of Harriet Martineau and the English Lakes 1851

This gallery contains 8 photos.

William Wells Brown was a Kentucky-born fugitive slave touring the anti-slavery lecture circuit in the British Isles during 1849-1851. In two letters to Frederick Douglass, which are now included in Wells Brown’s memoirs “Three years in Europe”, he records his … Continue reading

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1832: Africans and Missionaries pitched against Planters and Church

Meeting of the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, 3 October 1832, Friends Meeting House, Manchester Long before the time appointed for the lecture, carriages were seen rolling up to the gates discharging their gay inmates…it is doubtful whether ever such an assemblage, … Continue reading

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The rights of man, woman, African and unitarian

This gallery contains 9 photos.

October 28 1787, Manchester Collegiate Church ‘When I went into the church it was so full that I could scarcely get to my place; for notice had been publicly given, though I knew nothing of it, that such a discourse … Continue reading

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It’s not all about Abe: the uncelebrated activists of the anti-slavery movement

This gallery contains 8 photos.

To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States. ‘As citizens of Manchester, assembled at the Free-Trade Hall, we beg to express our fraternal sentiments towards you and your country. We rejoice in your greatness, as an outgrowth of England, whose … Continue reading

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Letters from Joseph Shawcross, mill worker and political prisoner, Chester Castle 1849

Uprising in Hyde. Chartist, Joseph Shawcross, was 50 when he was sentenced to one year in Chester Castle gaol for his part in the riots in Hyde, Cheshire, during August 1848. From there he wrote to his nineteen year-old daughter, … Continue reading

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