History (4,555 posts)

Double podcast about the Angry Brigade, Britain’s first home-grown urban guerrilla group, in the 1960s and 70s, in conversation with John Barker, who was put on trial as part of the group.

A four-part podcast series on the Italian resistance to fascism, both during World War Two and immediately after, in conversation with anti-fascist partisans themselves.

A new housing estate in Leeds is set to be names in memory of locally born suffragette, Leonora Cohen. In 1923, she became the first woman president of the Yorkshire Federation of Trades Councils, in 1924 she was appointed as one of the first female magistrates in the country and in 1928 was awarded an OBE in recognition of her social work.

Letchworth Village was both a model for compassionate care and a symbol of institutional abuse

Between September 1935 and June 1936, sixty-two girls from a reformatory in north-central Kansas were sterilized in the name of eugenics. None of the girls were habitual criminals, had multiple children, were living on social welfare, or were found to have IQs below seventy; in other words, almost none of them fit the categories usually described by eugenicists as justification for sterilization or covered by Kansas’s eugenic sterilization law. Yet no one at the time—including the reform school superintendent who ordered the procedures performed—had trouble defending the sterilizations as eugenically minded. The general public, however, found the justifications significantly more controversial after the story hit the newspapers.