Radical History Blog

Martin Niemöller's confession is known across the world - but who actually was he? As far as radical, progressive politics is concerned, Martin Niemöller was not a commendable man.

2022 is looking like another busy year in the radical calendar! So, another year comes to an end - and what a year it's been... Donald Trump finally left the White House in January - though he did take some persuading.

The story of how radicals in Czechoslovakia tried to democratise Soviet rule It’s not often that Spring begins in January… But that’s exactly what happened in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in 1968, when Alexander Dubček became – mouthful alert – First Secretary of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

The British Communist and scholar who died fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War"I am not just paying a conventional tribute to a dead man when I say that he was a real hero." On this day in 1936, Ralph Winston Fox was killed.

The story of the black activists who accused the United States of genocide ‘The responsibility of being the first in history to charge the government of the United States of America with the crime of genocide is not one your petitioners take lightly.’ Eleanor Roosevelt called it ‘ridiculous’, but the Civil Rights Congress went ahead anyway.

A radical poet whose work was burned by the Nazis in Germany... spent his life interpreting the cold facts of political economy, but he still managed to find time for poems. Poetry, he believed, could make vivid the struggle of the masses.

William Lloyd Garrison, circa 1870 The abolitionist you probably haven't heard of...

The story of the strike that ended in a massacre... American democracy, both political and economic, took huge strides forward when the Union won the Civil War in 1865. locked in the abolition of slavery and black voting rights.

The story of Wolfe Tone and the origins of Irish Republicanism... Theobald Wolfe Tone, the founder of Irish republicanism, died today in 1798 while awaiting execution by the British state.

The story of how Sun Yat-sen became the first President of the Republic of China "For forty years, I have devoted myself to the cause of the people’s revolution with but one aim in view – the elevation of China to a position of freedom and equality among the nations." Before the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949, there was the Chinese Republican Revolution of 1911, and Sun Yat-sen was one of its main characters.