Susan Pedersen teaches at Columbia. Burn This Letter: Love and Trouble in a Marriage of Four is out now.
Afriendly ghost hovers over The Modern British City, the collaborative project of a crack team of historians of urban life. H.J. (Jim) Dyos died in 1978, still in his fifties, but as the UK’s first professor of urban history and still more through his enthusiastic collaborations and magpie methods, he indelibly shaped the study of city life. Dyos was a thoroughly mid-century and...
I’m not on social media, in part because the level of my rage and anxiety about American politics doesn’t need to get any higher. But I do feel obliged to keep an eye on the polity: I read the papers, go occasionally to demonstrations and, each morning, as I walk the twenty blocks from my apartment to Columbia to teach my classes, listen to news podcasts. Which means I spent the...
The Second World War is often described as a total war – that is, a war which blurred the divide between front and home front, colony and metropole, women and men, soldier and civilian. But if we shift our attention from Dunkirk and Normandy eastwards – to the war Germany unleashed against Poland and then, from 1941, the Soviet Union – total war seems an understatement....
Book titles are like city buses: they bunch up and arrive in packs. When historians were obsessed with identity, collective nouns proliferated: Citizens (1989), Britons (1992), Commoners (1993), Aristocrats (1994). Foucault prompted genealogies of ‘isms’: orientalism, internationalism, imperialism, globalism, neoliberalism. But for historians, nothing beats the gerund: the verb...
Historians are often drawn to what I think of as the ‘strange bedfellows’ problem. When I explain to students Britain’s odd mid-century political alliances – the Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald teaming up with his Conservative predecessor Stanley Baldwin in 1931, the Labour leaders who expelled MacDonald for that act themselves joining Churchill’s...
Susan Pedersen talks to Joanna Biggs about Shelagh Delaney and her landmark 1958 play, A Taste of Honey.
Susan Pedersen on the birth of ‘International Relations’.
I have often thought of writing a history of own goals. It would try to identify the factors common to the great boomerangs of the past: the conceit that mistakes itself for cunning, the...
When Susan Pedersen writes that Eleanor Rathbone was the most significant woman in British politics in the first half of the 20th century she might have added that another Somerville alumna,...
In the Seventies and Eighties, right-wing think-tanks and their academic lapdogs put about the idea that the ills of contemporary Britain were fundamentally due to its genteel aversion to...
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