History (4,902 posts)

Like many advances in reproductive technology, the artificial womb lent itself first to speculative fiction, then to scientific research, and finally to feminist theory. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the artificial womb appeared in hundreds of pulpy newspaper stories and dystopian novels, including Brave New World (1932), in which ectogenesis—the development of embryos outside the uterus—enables the mass production of human beings. Above: The first ‘incubator babies’ from the 1909 World Fair.

This is where his institutional career would begin: Rochester Borstal, the original children’s detention centre in Britain, where borstals themselves would later acquire their name. Opened in 1902 beside the Kentish village of Borstal, now swallowed up by the town of Rochester, it’s the sort of place you’d expect Miss Trunchbull to be nutting about in, terrorising the kids with maniacal joy. Heading the experimental scheme was the prison commissioner, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, who was seeking an alternative to the usual treatment of putting children directly into adult prisons.

Over three days in April 1981, violence broke out in Brixton, London between young people – who were largely Black and working class – and the Metropolitan Police. Hundreds were injured. What did the government inquiry into the ‘Brixton riots’ or ‘Brixton uprisings’ find out?

“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood . . . back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism . . . to one’s youthful idea of “the artist” and the all-sufficiency of “art” and “beauty” and “love” . . . back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” Henry James

My present subject is perhaps the only unquestionable dent made by a secular movement in the Christian or any other official calendar, a holiday established not in one or two countries, but in 1990 officially in 107 states. What is more, it is an occasion established not by the power of governments or conquerors, but by an entirely unofficial movement of poor men and women. I am speaking of May Day, or more precisely of the First of May, the international festival of the working-class movement, whose centenary ought to have been celebrated in 1990, for it was inaugurated in 1890.

Volume 49, Issue 1, February 2024, Page 26-52
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The analysis of capitalism that Karl Marx presented in the three volumes of Capital remains vital to understanding our social world. A renowned Marxian economist talked to Jacobin to break down the key points of Marx’s economic theory.

Figure 1. Dorothy Stokes on holiday with Barney, 1930s. Album 242, Dorothy Stokes photographic collection. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland.

Few San Francisco neighborhoods have had more ups and downs than the 33-block area still called “The Tenderloin”—a name which derives from the late 19th century police practice of shaking down local restaurants and butcher shops by taking their best cuts of beef in lieu of cash bribes. At various periods in its storied past, the Tenderloin has been home to famous brothels, Prohibition-era speakeasies, San Francisco’s first gay bars, well-known hotels and jazz clubs, film companies and recording studies, and professional boxing gyms. Above: Upper Tenderloin Historic District

Reform UK looks to prey on class anger, formed by the economic misery of the cost of living crisis, stagnating wages and collapsing public services. But Reform UK pushes a neoliberal agenda that will do nothing to address the social crisis facing the ­working class. That class anger is deflected by racism. One person on the doorstep who intended to vote for Reform UK ranted about “the ­immigrant invasion”.