London Socialist Historians
26th April
Summer Term 2020 Update on seminars, newsletter & activities
Ordinarily socialist history seminars for the summer term 2020 would have been starting on Monday 4th and continuing every couple of weeks into June and the end of the 2019/20 academic year.
Its not quite ordinary inevitably because Monday May 4th would have been the May Day Bank Holiday (we’ll be marking May Day on the day itself as usual) but the Government changed that to Friday May 8th to mark VE Day.
However the Institute of Historical Research is currently closed and we are not able to hold seminars at the moment.
Apologies to those who were planning to attend the last seminar of the Spring Term on Monday March 16th, Rhys Williams on Tom Mann in Australia, which I cancelled at short notice but I think prudently so. We plan to re-arrange the seminar for the next time Rhys, who is based in Australia, is in the UK.
The summer term LSHG Newsletter will be produced as usual during May, perhaps a little later than usual as there are no seminars to publicise.
Dates for seminars for the academic year 2020/21 should be available during May. It is hoped to resume seminars from October 2020 but obviously it is too early yet to be definite on that. We have a number of papers and speakers on a waiting list!
There are a range of virtual socialist history activities currently being undertaken and details of these are probably best checked by following the London Socialist Historians twitter account @LSHGofficial and by visiting the website http://londonsocialisthistorians.blogspot.com/ where every issue of the Newsletter back to 1997 is now on-line.
Finally there are some socialist history podcasts available on the IHR website. Below is a link to a seminar John Newsinger gave in November 2017 on Orwell and the left:
https://www.history.ac.uk/podcasts/revolution-labourism-orwell-and-left
There is plenty for socialists to be doing even in times like these but history remains a vital context to current events.
Keith Flett, LSHG Convenor
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