A General Introduction to India by Bob Cranwell

This is an article written by Bob Cranwell, author of the website Amateur Emigrant.  He worked in adventure and tailormade travel as a Tour Leader and driver, an Operations Manager, Country Manager, Travel Agent and Tour Operator.  He has done a vast array of different jobs from emptying cesspits using a bucket nailed to an old oar, to creating documents which formed part of a submission to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Read more…

The Missing Story of Mary Burns and Fred: Silences in the Story of History

Coming shortly…. This is a placeholder for an article which is to be published soon as an appendix to a peer reviewed paper submitted to the PRISM Journal and presented at the 2020 Working Class Academics conference. The paper submitted to PRISM is called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons People: A Marmot Overview’ and lays out a perspective on how ‘workingclassness’ can be interpreted as being on a spectrum of having to perform to gain access to sufficiency, the mechanics of a hierarchy of permissions and allowances, the psychology of exclusion, and the effects on life expectancy and health as drawn from Michael Marmot‘s work. Read more…

The Highland Clearances: Reading History and Dispossession

This is not a history of Scotland, this is a history of much of the world where people have been displaced from ancestral lands and commons by bullies. People have been dispossessed from lands at various places and at various times by others who have stolen it by force or by cunning, but it all too often amounts to the same thing – sorrows and harms being unfairly visited upon those at a disadvantage. Read more…

The Lapps by Robert Cranwell

The people we call the Lapps are known by a variety of other names, including Lopar, Sabine and Sami amongst others. The origins of our name for them has also provoked a number of explanations; some say it comes from the old Swedish “lopar” – meaning “to run”, and presumably referring to the speed of their movement on skis, achieved with a loping action. Still others say it comes from the Mongolian “lu-pe” – going northwards, or from the archaic Finnish term “lappes” – meaning “banished”. Read more…

Opinion Piece: Teaching; How Society Gets Taught History by Books and Media and Politics by Maurice Frank

Older generations writing up history such that everything used to be better and slagging “young people today” has been around cyclically for thousands of years, and is a regular failing of emotionally divided societies. But But I can see no other case in history, of generations having their whole era, including in what is believed possibly can happen, and their status in history, rubbished with the media’s approval and active taking part, as the present generations living after WW2, at the hands of oldies who also believe every epic problem imaginable was fought, won, and solved forever, entirely by them, entirely in the 1940s. Read more…