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Sam Wetherell

@samwetherell.bsky.social

2.2K followers 570 following 570 posts

Historian of Britain and the World at the University of York. Interested in cities, art-making and the future. Liverpool and the Un-Making of Britain out now: www.samwetherell.com

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · Jan 28

On 27 Feb my book comes out. It’s about how Liverpool’s recent history should change the way we think about modern Britain. On this thread every few days till then, I will tweet an extraordinary fact about Liverpool’s twentieth-century. Pre-order here: www.waterstones.com/book/liverpo...

Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain by Sam Wetherell | Waterstones

Buy Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain by Sam Wetherell from Waterstones today! Click and Collect from your local Waterstones or get FREE UK delivery on orders over £25.

www.waterstones.com

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Reposted by Sam Wetherell

flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 9h

“Why haven’t the protests against successive governments’ complicity in genocide stopped”, a mystery that is apparently beyond our finest political minds to fathom

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Reposted by Sam Wetherell

Laura C Forster @lauracforster.bsky.social · 5d

I've got a new article out @historyworkshop.org.uk. It argues for history as a form of intergenerational friendship.
History, like friendship, can be a politically powerful way of talking and thinking across time, and can connect past, present, and future struggle ✊
academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-...

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 1d

Striking and grimly predictable that the most consequential effect of Liz Truss's premiership has been to radically constrain the state's political and economic imagination. She lost the battle, but won the war by binding Britain seemingly forever to austerity. www.ft.com/content/7615...

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 4d

The essay concludes by saying that we should, in the face of our present moment, return to the works of John Stewart Mill and Locke. It is a great shame that we have the public intellectuals we deserve, rather than the ones we greatly need.

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 4d

It should be more incredible that even now, the central contradiction of liberalism — that its emergence was coterminous with settler colonial expansion, slavery and ecological devastation — is utterly lost on one of the leading public historians of our generation.

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 4d

The qualifying sentence that begins "to be sure" is doing an *enormous* amount of heavy lifting in this saccharine and naive attempt to rehabilitate the nascent liberalism of the eighteenth century Atlantic World. The ruins of the present owe so much to this past. www.ft.com/content/650a...

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 4d

With great cat content!

Reposted by Sam Wetherell

Alistair Fair @alistairfair.bsky.social · 4d

End of week reading. @samwetherell.bsky.social's excellent new urban history of post-war Liverpool.

A tortoiseshell cat, sitting on curled up human legs, on which a copy of a book is also visible. The human to whom the legs belong is sitting on a carpeted floor, and is in increasing discomfort due to not being very flexible.

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 6d

Sounds very much like a 1930s chemist’s concoction!

Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 6d

Let’s say, hypothetically, you had a big public book event in front of 120 people later, and you’d completely lost your voice this morning. What could someone in this situation do in the next ten hours?

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Reposted by Sam Wetherell

Sam Grinsell @samgrinsell.bsky.social · 13d

Very pleased that my piece 'Urban history as urgent work, an argument for disciplinary promiscuity' has been published in @urbanhistory.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S096...
Many thanks to @mctom.bsky.social for organising the roundtable that got these thoughts going back in 2023! #UrbanHist #EnvHums

Urban history as urgent work, an argument for disciplinary promiscuity | Urban History | Cambridge Core

Urban history as urgent work, an argument for disciplinary promiscuity

doi.org

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 8d

Labour Party politicians and grandees speed running the British Empire by doing indentured servitude and Mandatory Palestine in the same week.

Farrukh @implausibleblog.bsky.social · 8d

Krishnan Guru Murthy, "Isn't it a bit insulting to say to an Indian doctor who is working 60-70 hours a week that in order to get settled status he's got to volunteer?"

Rachel Reeves, "We want people to contribute if they come to our country"

Labour have gone utterly bonkers

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 8d

He’s was like a gangly stoned cassandra.

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 8d

When he was PM in 2004 Tony Blair visited my now academised sixth form in Milton Keynes which was built during his reign. He was due to walk under an enclosed windowed bridge and my friend Dan was about to press his bare arse against the glass when a teacher stopped him at the last minute. Alas.

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 8d

Blair's post-genocide plans for a new Mandatory Palestine should be a delegitimising project for an entire faction of Labour. In terms of scandal by association this is far worse than anything Mandleson has done. A generation of British politicians should be haunted by the words "Gaza Trump Riviera"

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 9d

The problem here is the limitations of viewing "racism" as individual pathology rather than a structural historical force. Doing the former is to fall into a political trap that Reform will always win. Doing the latter implicates Labour too, as it should.

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 10d

My two year old woke up, seemingly for the day, at 2.45am. Happy weekend everyone

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 12d

I wonder if mandatory ID cards inevitably with little flags on them tied directly to citizenship will make Reform's plans to round up and deport more than a hundred thousand people easier, or harder?

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 12d

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Reposted by Sam Wetherell

Past and Present @pastpresentsoc.bsky.social · 12d

New on advance access: "Bodies, Tides, Timber, and the Global History of London’s Docks, 1860–1928"

by Simeon Koole (@uobrishistory.bsky.social) and @benmechen.bsky.social (@uclhistory.bsky.social)

#OpenAccess

doi.org/10.1093/past...

Bodies, Tides, Timber, and the Global History of London’s Docks, 1860–1928*

Abstract. This article examines changes in the bodies and environment of labourers carrying timber imported into London’s docks in the 1860s to the 1920s t

doi.org

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 12d

We will all know Starmer is truly finished when the press start noticing, for the very first time, that Labour received half a million fewer votes in 2024 than in 2019. Mandleson is probably going to email the Wikipedia entry for the 2024 election to Beth Rigby at any moment.

Saul Staniforth @saulstaniforth.bsky.social · 12d

Lisa Nandy is asked about polling that shows Labour is on course for a big defeat at the next election.

Nandy explains that Starmer turned Labour around, from the defeat in 2019 (when 10.2m people voted Labour) to the victory in 2024 (when 9.7m people voted Labour).

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 12d

These are all great points. I’d also add that we should oppose this out of solidarity with people who are here “illegally” and shouldn’t have to live lives that are even more criminalised, precarious and hunted.

Paul Bernal @paulbernal.bsky.social · 16d

A short thread on digital ID (cards) just to bear in mind. There are a few myths that I keep hearing about this idea that need clarifying/debunking. 1/10

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 13d

Lovely review of Liverpool and the Un-Making of Britain from the excellent Isaac Rose, whose book on the gentrification of Manchester, The Rentier City, is *essential.* statmagazine.org/liverpool-an...

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 14d

I guess it's hard to know which is worse. Whether this unbelievably juvenile and massively unproductive reading of the present conjuncture/twentieth century history is a take Kamala Harris *actually* believes or whether she just feels its a sensible/smart thing to say. thehill.com/homenews/cam...

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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 15d

The destruction of the present Labour Party?

The Ineffable Horror of Joe Muggs @joemuggs.bsky.social · 15d

What’s the most Tory-coded thing you actively love?

Me: Essex. Elgar. Country pubs.

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