Slavery and the Black Country: coming home

We've recently looked at how deeply the trade in human lives was embedded in the financial and industrial creation of the Black Country, with roots running through almost every facet of life in the eighteenth century. But of course, slavery was not solely a distant project, enacted on continents and islands thousands of miles away …

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Righteous Among The Nations

I often walk the dog in Mary Stevens Park, in Stourbridge, and walk through the grand, now-restored gates. This morning though, it was a plaque on the wall to the right of the gates that caught my eye. There's a tribute there to one Frank Foley, a Devonian by birth but one who died in …

A Black Country Brexit

I was going to post another bit about the navvies of Elan Valley today, but it seems a bit strange to be discussing late-Victorian municipal water schemes when we're living through Actual History as we speak. The fall-out from the EU referendum on Thursday continues apace. There has been much talk about historical parallels since, most …

Don’t read below the line

Controversy de la semaine around these parts comes in the wake of the increasingly-popular Black Country Festival. This sort of thing is a great idea - fostering a bit of community spirit can only be good for morale amongst a particularly under-employed, under-paid part of the country, and encouraging people to make use of their local areas …

First as tragedy, then as farce

History can be a depressing mistress sometimes. Most people will be familiar with an expression attributed to Marx, that history repeats itself "the first as tragedy, the second as farce." In fact, Marx was quoting Hegel and referring specifically to "great world-historic facts and personages, but it's still held to be true. Even Slavoj Zizek says so, …