Early in February 1943 Mohandas Gandhi informed the Governor General of India, Lord Linlithgow, that he had decided to undertake a fast for a period of twenty-one days. Gandhi was at that time a prisoner at the Aga Khan palace in the city of Poona, near Bombay. He and his associates had been arrested on 9 August 1942 after the All India Congress Committee had adopted a resolution calling for the withdrawal of British rule over India. Violent protest demonstrations and attacks on government property by angry Indians following the arrest of the leaders was met by ruthless repressive measures. With thousands of nationalists thrown into prison and with the overwhelming coercive authority of the British Indian Government mobilized against them, the leaderless and unarmed Indian adherents and supporters of the Congress Party were beaten back and cowed down.

In this periodical, in a previous article covering the period 1777–1865, it was revealed that many New York Afro-Americans had refused to view with apathy, or even equanimity, their changed political status following the end of the American Revolution. Under New York State's 1777 Constitution, freed Black Americans had held equal suffrage rights with whites, but shortly thereafter discovered that most of these voting rights were to be whittled down, initially by the Democratic-Republicans. Many New York Afro-Americans, individually and in concert reacted to the watering down of their political rights by consistently petitioning the New York State Legislature to restore their political rights as held under the 1777 Constitution. However, the dominant group's stereotype of the Colored American prevailed since petition after petition failed to convince, first the legislators and later the white voters that they should restore equal political status to Afro-Americans in New York.

On April 6, 1920 the French government, in reprisal for the entry of German troops into the demilitarized zone of the Ruhr, occupied Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Hanau, and Homburg. During the occupation French Moroccan soldiers fired on a German mob in Frankfurt and killed several. In covering the event the Daily Herald, alone among English newspapers, called special attention to the “race” of the French troops. It headlined:

FRANKFURT RUNS WITH BLOOD

FRENCH BLACK TROOPS USE

MACHINE GUNS ON CIVILIANS

On April 10, the Herald followed its accounts of events on the Rhine by a front page article by Edmund Dene Morel under banner leads:

BLACK SCOURGE IN EUROPE

SEXUAL HORROR LET LOOSE BY FRANCE ON RHINE DISAPPEARANCE OF YOUNG GERMAN GIRLS

France, Morel wrote, “is thrusting her black savages …into the heart of Germany.” There “primitive African barbarians”, carriers of syphilis, have become a “terror and a horror” to the Palatinate countryside. The “barely restrainable beastiality of the black troops” has led to many rapes, an especially serious problem since Africans are “the most developed sexually of any” race and “for well-known physiological reasons, the raping of a white woman by a negro is nearly always accompanied by serious injury and not infrequently has fatal results.…” Morel had reports of rapes, “some of them of an atrocious character”, and of “dead bodies of young women discovered under manure heaps and so on”. German municipalities were forced to provide bordellos and white women, and even young boys, for these over-sexed blacks. Master-minding this effort to “ruin, enslave, degrade, dismember [and] reduce to the lowest depths of despair and humiliation a whole people” was a “ruthless” and militaristic French government. Furthermore Morel warned his working class readers, “If the manhood of these races, not so advanced in the forms of civilisation as ourselves, are to be used against the Germans, why not against the workers here or elsewhere?”

The election of Hugo Haase to the Co-Chairmanship of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1911 was an event of immense importance for the future of German Social Democracy. It was Haase who served as the principal spokesman of the opposition to the cooperationist policies of the majority during World War I. It was he who led that opposition out of the SPD in 1917. After the war, as co-chairman both of the revolutionary government and of the Independent Social Democratic Party, he helped to insure that the German movement would remain permanently divided.

Die Forschungen zur Geschichte des Kommunistenbundes befinden sich immer noch in der Phase der Materialerschließung. Es konnte in jüngster Zeit nicht zuletzt deshalb zu Kontroversen über die historische Bedeutung dieses Geheimbundes im Rahmen der deutschen Arbeiter-bewegung kommen, weil ein sehr beträchtlicher Teil des erhaltenen Materials der Forschung bisher teils nicht bekannt teils nicht zugänglich war. In Anbetracht dieses unbefriedigenden Zustandes ist zu begrüßen, daß die Institute für Marxismus-Leninismus in Moskau und Berlin die Edition der ihnen verfügbaren Dokumente zur Geschichte des Bundes der Kommunisten angekündigt haben. Unabhängig davon, aber in Abstimmung mit dem Vorhaben der Moskauer und Berliner Historiker, betreibt das Amsterdamer Internationale Institut für Sozialgeschichte die Veröffentlichung des restlichen Materials, das sich noch über den Kommunistenbund in seinem Besitz befindet. Im Zusammenhang damit werden hier drei Dokumente zur Geschichte des Bundes der Kommunisten im Sommer 1850 vorgelegt.

David Urquhart (1805–1877), the inspirer of the agitation that took his name, has been succinctly described as “an ex-diplomatic official who carried his Russuphobia to an almost pathological extreme”. As an official at the British Embassy in Constantinople, Urquhart, whose admiration for the Turks knew no bounds, had tried to engineer a war between Britain and Russia. In his eccentric way he ascribed his subsequent removal from a position of diplomatic responsibihty to the work of Russian agents in the British Foreign Office. The phobia grew. David Urquhart, a man of compelling charm and deep idealism, came to regard the Czar as the Antichrist and to see his minions everywhere. In particular, Urquhart turned his attack on Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary who had recalled him to England in July, 1837, and whom he now represented as an agent in an international conspiracy.

The period of the great French Wars of 1793–1815 saw a crop of strikes and other disturbances in North East England. The end of the wars in 1815 was followed rapidly by the great seamen's strike of 1815, which turned fundamentally on a question of redundancy. The object of this paper is to consider a series of disputes just before the outbreak of war, and during the war's early years, disputes which turned fundamentally on the equally perennial question of the regulation of wages at a time of rising prices.

In the autumn of 1883 a small, anonymous penny pamphlet bearing the provocative title The Bitter Cry of Outcast London appeared in the London bookstores. Its impact was so immediate and cataclysmic that it must be considered one of the great pieces of Victorian reform literature. According to contemporary opinion the pamphlet provoked an “immense interest” in and “drew attention universally to the subject” of the dwellings of the working classes, and by the winter of 1883 it was unanimously agreed that urban slum conditions had “assumed the dimensions of a primary question” and had become “the subject of the day”. Alfred Spender, the editor of the Westminster Gazette, stated in 1913 that it was almost impossible to recapture “the sensation which such a pamphlet as ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’ made when it was first produced”. Suddenly, almost overnight, it seemed, England awoke to the grim facts of the slums. “The revelations concerning ‘Outcast London’”, commented Reynolds Newspaper, “cause a tremendous sensation and thrill of horror through the land…” In January 1884 the Pall Mall Gazette wrote that The Bitter Cry had been echoing from one end of England to the other, and commented, ”We shall have to go back a long time to discover an agitation on any social question in England which has produced so prompt, so wide-spread, and, as we believe, so enduring an effect.” Two years after its publication it was reported that The Bitter Cry “rang through the length and breadth of the land. It touched the hearts of tens of thousands, and awoke deep feelings of indignation, pain, and sympathy in every direction.”

The keelmen, who transferred coal in keels or barges from the river banks to the waiting colliers at the ports of the north-eastern coalfield, had a history of industrial unrest during the eighteenth century, particularly on Tyneside. So early as 1671 there is an entry in Gateshead parish books which reads: “Paide for powder and match when the keelemen mutinyed 2s.”, and five strikes occurred between 1738 and 1771. As a relatively powerful economic group, which, in the absence of any other method of transporting the coal from the inland pits to the colliers bound chiefly for London, could almost put a stop to the coal trade, the keelmen were often successful in obtaining consent to their demands, especially in the field of wages, where they were well-paid as compared with other labouring groups. In spite of this they had a continuing grievance, with regard to the overloading of the keels, which it was difficult to satisfy, even although an Act of Parliament, passed in 1787, to establish a permanent fund for the support of sick and aged keelmen, had contained the following:

“…. in order that the keels used on the River Tyne may be fairly and justly loaded, after the due and accustomed rate of eight chaldrons to each keel, be it enacted …. that no person or persons shall …. be capable of acting as an offputter or offputters at any coal staith upon the said river, until he or they respectively shall have taken and subscribed an oath ….”

When war came to Europe in August 1914, several thousand Russians were caught by surprise in Switzerland, and their number increased with the influx of refugees from Austria and Germany. Cut off from their homeland and temporarily unable to exchange their money, they faced great hardship. Self-help societies sprang up everywhere; some groups experimented with organizing cheap or free kitchens. Swiss newspapers continually carried notices of benefit concerts or literary evenings. The Russian mission in Bern offered assistance, and the degree of cooperation which briefly sprang up between Russian émigré organizations and the Russian legation was subsequently to prove an embarrassment for both sides.

In the Machno movement (Machnovščina), which took place in the Ukraine in the years 1918–1921, two components can be distinguished, a partisan movement, and an anarchist movement.

Wir wollen es keinem Leser verargen, wenn er befürchtet, daß ihn in diesem Aufsatz ein Kehraus der Kulturgeschichte erwartet. Hat die Disziplin nicht längst ihren Offenbarungseid geleistet und, was irgend an Werten greifbar war, an ihre Hauptgläubiger, z. B. an die Diszi-plinen Volkskunde und Geistesgeschichte abgetreten? Man wird es aber auch uns nicht verargen, wenn wir uns dagegen verwahren, das Thema einer Marotte halber gewählt zu haben und bei einer Art der Geschichtsbetrachtung und Geschichtsschreibung stehen geblieben zu sein, von der es schon zur Zeit Wilhelm Giesebrechts sarkastisch hieß, sie sei „eine Olla podrida von tausend Wunderlichkeiten”, und von der wir selbst behaupten, sie sei nicht erst durch eine wissenschaftliche Entwicklung überholt worden, sondern ihrem Wesen nach von Anfang an überholungsbedürftig gewesen. Obwohl wir diese Art Kulturgeschichte nicht im Sinn haben, wollen wir das Problem der Kulturgeschichte nicht ganz auf sich beruhen lassen. Denn da sie nun einmal schon zur Zeit Giesebrechts „ein so vieldeutiger und viel mißdeuteter Name” war, kann man sich nicht einfach dadurch sicherstellen, daß man darauf verweist, daß in der Epoche des Imperialismus die Kulturgeschichte, die sich in der baürgerlichen Gesellschaft vieler Anhänger erfreute, die aber vom Staat allenfalls gleichgültig betrachtet wurde und kaum über Lehrstühle verfügte, von der Politischen Geschichte, die nach der Gründung des Deutschen Reiches von der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft aufgewertet wurde, dem jungen nationalen Machtstaat vonnoten war und über zahlreiche Lehrstühle verfügte, in einem sehr ungleichen Kampf aus dem Felde geschlagen wurde. Genügte es, hierauf zu verweisen, so ließe sich nach dem Spruch: nomen est omen auf das allgemeine Los der Besiegten kommen und behaupten, die Kritik an der Kulturgeschichte sei bloße Kritik am Namen Kulturgeschichte, Kritik an einer ohnmächtigen und verdrängten Disziplin, Kritik, die Auswüchse statt der Sache selbst zur Zielscheibe nahm und fälschlich „eine Olla podrida von tausend Wunderlichkeiten” dem Gespött von Zunft, Verwaltung und Öffentlichkeit preisgab, während beispielsweise einem Lamprecht doch nur etliche Schludrigkeiten und Irrtümer nachzusagen waren. Ist aber nicht Dietrich Schäfer, der Herold der triumphierenden Politischen Geschichtsschreibung, in-zwischen mit seinem ganzen System, aller Stichhaltigkeit des Détails ungeachtet, hinfällig und anrüchig geworden?

In our notice of Histoire et sociologie du travail féminin on p. 273 of the previous issue we wrote that the author, Mrs Evelyne Sullerot, had not used the work Les fonctions des femmes dans l'industrie by Madeleine Guilbert. As a matter of fact she did use that work, although it is not mentioned in her bibliography but on p. 279 only. Hence our oversight, for which we apologize.