The People's History Museum in Manchester, England, is the UK's national centre for the collection, conservation, interpretation and study of material relating to the history of working people in the UK. It is located in a grade II-listed, former hydraulic pumping station on the corner of the Bridge Street and Water Street designed by Manchester Corporation City Architect, Henry Price.
Bishopsgate Library, now known as Bishopgate Institute's Special Collections and Archives is an independent, charity-funded library located within the Bishopsgate Institute in the City of London.
Owenism is the utopian socialist philosophy of 19th-century social reformer Robert Owen and his followers and successors, who are known as Owenites. Owenism aimed for radical reform of society and is considered a forerunner of the cooperative movement. The Owenite movement undertook several experiments in the establishment of utopian communities organized according to communitarian and cooperative principles. One of the best known of these efforts, which were largely unsuccessful, was the project at New Harmony, Indiana, which started in 1825 and was abandoned by 1829. Owenism is also closely associated with the development of the British trade union movement, and with the spread of the Mechanics' Institute movement.
Henry Hetherington was an English printer, bookseller, publisher and newspaper proprietor who campaigned for social justice, a free press, universal suffrage and religious freethought. Together with his close associates, William Lovett, John Cleave and James Watson, he was a leading member of numerous co-operative and radical groups, including the Owenite British Association for the Promotion of Co-operative Knowledge, the National Union of the Working Classes and the London Working Men's Association. As proprietor of The Poor Man's Guardian he played a major role in the "War of the Unstamped" and was imprisoned three times for refusing to pay newspaper stamp duty. He was a leader of the "moral force" wing of the Chartist movement and a supporter of pro-democracy movements in other countries. His name is included on the Reformers' Memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery.
The Tamiment Library is a research library at New York University that documents radical and left history, with strengths in the histories of communism, socialism, anarchism, the New Left, the Civil Rights Movement, and utopian experiments. The Robert F. Wagner Archives, which is also housed in Bobst Library at NYU, documents American labor history. Together the two units form an important center for scholarly research on labor and the left.
Royal visits to Manchester and the surrounding areas in the nineteenth century signify important achievements in the city's history and offer an insight into the development of the area during this period. Moreover, Manchester's response to such visits, the preparations and public displays of loyalty to the crown, challenge the perceived political history of Victorian Manchester, which was famed for its Liberalist notions, Free Trade and the radical position of parties such as the Chartists.
William Benbow was a nonconformist preacher, pamphleteer, pornographer and publisher, and a prominent figure of the Reform Movement in Manchester and London. He worked with William Cobbett on the radical newspaper Political Register, and spent time in prison as a consequence of his writing, publishing and campaigning activities. He has been credited with formulating and popularising the idea of a general strike for the purpose of political reform.
The National Labour Press (NLP) was founded in 1909 to undertake printing for the Independent Labour Party (ILP). It published the Labour Leader as well as other ILP material. It was originally located at 30 Blackfriars Street.
Lloyd Jones was an Irish socialist and union activist, advocate of co-operation, journalist and writer.
Manchester has historically influenced political and social thinking in Britain and been a hotbed for new, radical thinking, particularly during the Industrial Revolution.
Solidarity was a small libertarian socialist organisation from 1960 to 1992 in the United Kingdom. It published a magazine of the same name. Solidarity was close to council communism in its prescriptions and was known for its emphasis on workers' self-organisation and for its radical anti-Leninism.
Sir Richard Coppock was a British trade unionist and politician.
The Manchester Trades Union Council brings together trade union branches in Manchester in England.
Ruth Frow was a peace activist and historian of the labour movement. She co-founded the Working Class Movement Library in Salford, a collection of material associated with labour and working class history.
Sarah Reddish was a British trade unionist and suffragette, who was active in the co-operative movement. A supporter of women running for local elections as a springboard to gaining national voting rights, she ran for office on the Bolton School Board and was successful in her second attempt in 1899. She also ran for office as a Poor Law Guardian, and was successful, but was defeated in her attempt to become a member of the borough council. As a textile worker, Reddish knew first-hand the conditions and wages women experienced and joined unions, working as a paid organiser to help women improve their situations. She was both a socialist and a radical feminist, urging women's equality in the public sphere.
Edward Owen Greening was a British co-operative and radical activist.
James Gorman was a British politician and trade unionist.
William Leonard Hall was a British trade union leader, journalist, and socialist activist, who held prominent positions in the Independent Labour Party.
Lady Elizabeth Swann was a social activist, philanthropist, and advocate for trade unionism, and women's suffrage, and the development of midwifery, as well as an important figure in the development of organised humanism and the Ethical movement in Britain. She was the wife of Liberal Party politician Sir Charles Ernest Swann MP.
Publications Distribution Cooperative (PDC) was set up in 1976 to distribute radical, socialist, feminist, green/ecology and community publications in Britain to the book and newsagent trade.
