Katrina Navickas

What happened to class? New histories of labour and collective action in Britain

Recently, my family called me a ‘labour historian’. A ‘labour historian’ is one of the last epithets I would give to my thoroughly bourgeois self, so I considered why they made that association. In 2005, I published an article rethinking Luddism, the machine-breaking outbreaks of 1812. It stuck out somewhat incongruously as an old-fashioned topic, although I had reworked it with a postmodernist nod towards the agency of language. In the heyday of labour history in the 1960s and 1970s, it was a natural assumption to connect the study of trade unions and the Labour Party with labour’s more troublesome sister, social movements and popular protest. Yet over the past couple of decades, labour history has changed. Many of its historians no longer regard the labour (and Labour) movement as the be-all and end-all of the history of the working class. Their interests have diversified, shedding new light on identities and activities that are not completely subsumed by a narrative of class. Perhaps, indeed, I had mistaken myself for a labour historian of the old sort, even though methodologically and culturally I was far from being so. Although I did not realize it at the time, however, protest history had begun to be rethought and revived in a new direction. This is a review of recent developments in British labour and collective action history. In 2009, I returned to mythical leaders of machine-breakers. This time they were in the form of ‘Captain Swing’, that head of the eponymous rural agitation of the early 1830s. I duly attended

The search for ‘General Ludd’: the mythology of Luddism

Original article can be found at: http://www.informaworld.com/ Copyright Taylor and Francis [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]

“That sash will hang you”: Political Clothing and Adornment in England, 1780–1840

Original article can be found at : http://www.jstor.org/ Copyright University of Chicago Press

‘A Reformer's Wife ought to be an Heroine’: Gender, Family and English Radicals Imprisoned under the Suspension of Habeas Corpus Act of 1817

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Katrina Navickas, ‘ “Reformers Wife ought to be an Heroine”: Gender, Family and English Radicals Imprisoned under the Suspension of Habeas Corpus Act of 1817’, History, Vol. 101 (345): 246-264, April 2016, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.12227. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 21 Mar 2018. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

From Chartist Newspaper to Digital Map of Grassroots Meetings, 1841-1844: Documenting Workflows

This is a free access article published by Routledge in Journal of Victorian Culture, doi: 10.1080/13555502.2017.1301179.

Searching for the Material in Peter K. Andersson’s ‘How Civilized Were the Victorians?’

This document is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Victorian Culture on 6 December 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13555502.2016.1261591. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 6 June 2018.