This article will appear in issue 37: Oppression and Resistance In the wake of Salvador Allende’s victory in the 1970 Chilean presidential election, an enraged President Nixon called CIA director Richard Helms to the Oval Office. Having seen his attempts to influence the results of the election fail, Nixon ordered Helms to take a new Continue Reading
This article will feature in Issue 37: Oppression and Resistance The year is 1471, and sitting in the middle of Germany’s Romantic Road is a tranquil village – Nördlingen. Yet, like most German towns, Nördlingen was home to a licensed brothel. The brothel wasn’t just the home of 12 prostitutes, it was of substantial economic Continue Reading
This article will feature in Issue 37: Oppression and Resistance Classical Greece has long been perceived by modern Western countries as the birthplace of democracy, and has been used to shape and justify Eurocentric concepts of identity and political thought. When asked to imagine the Ancient Greek world, images of beautifully carved white marble statues, Continue Reading
No British politician of the last century has provoked such a visceral response within the music community as Thatcher. Countless artists took aim at her directly, but Thatcher was more than just a figure to be name dropped. She was a common enemy, a target for the malaise of the time, and a bogeyman figure, whose presence in music was felt if not seen. Artists used music to respond to societal rupture and economic deprivation at the hands of her government.
On hearing the phrase ‘bus boycott’, for most people, a certain plethora of images would spring to mind. The determined Rosa Parks sitting next to a white passenger on the bus, white policemen conducting her subsequent arrest, Martin Luther King in his prime protesting on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama. All images which constitute the most significant, and successful example of resistance to oppression in modern Western history. Replace those names and faces with the likes of Paul Stephenson, Guy Bailey and Roy Hackett. It’s probable that the average person has never heard of these people; nor could they put a name to a face. And this is exactly the problem – The Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 has slipped out of mainstream modern history. It may be omnipresent in the minds of those who witnessed it upfront in Bristol, but is mostly absent from the minds of young historians and from school curriculums today, despite its position as one of the most symbolic moments in Black British history.
