Peace

A curated collection that focuses on the topics of pacifism and global peace, particularly during the interwar period (1919-1939). The collection d...

Catalogue of the CND archive at LSE

Catalogue of the Campaign Against Arms Trade archive at LSE

Stories from the Bury St Edmunds Local Military Tribunal, 1916-1918

Holding tens of thousands of books, journals, pamphlets, zines, leaflets, posters and other archival materials, we focus on the history of anarchist groups and individuals in the UK and beyond, as well as on the history of other social movements, protests and radicalism in Nottingham & Notts...

Foreword During the Second World War, over 60,000 men and 1,000 women applied to register as conscientious objectors (COs) in England, Wales and Scotland. Although this was at least three times as many as in the First World War; it has remained something of an under reported history. The experience of First World War and […]

12, 392 p. 22 cm

A mathematical study of the causes and origins of war

viii, 387 pages ; 21 cm

xxvii, 308 p. ; 22 cm

x, 265 p. ; 23 cm

Most of the men who found themselves imprisoned for conscientious objection during World War I were characterised as absolutist objectors. These men were not willing to participate in the war effor…

The Wartime Statistics Committee was established by Meeting for Sufferings in June 1917, a year after the introduction of conscription, to collect statistics on men of military age. Its records are…

The Military Service Act came into force on 2 March 1916, and Quakers nationally are marking the centenary. Our new online exhibition Matter of conscience: Quakers and conscription gives an overvie…

Reimagining a True Social Order is a new AHRC funded website exploring the historic background and contemporary significance of the Eight Foundations of a True Social Order, first agreed by London …

This website explores the Foundations of a True Social Order, a document approved by Quakers in Britain near the end of the First World War.

At various points during the last four years we have marked the centenary of World War I on this blog by highlighting our collections relating to aspects of Quaker work at that time, including the …

Last month an exciting new exhibition telling the story of World War II conscientious objectors opened at the National War Museum at Edinburgh Castle. Conscience Matters is the result of a partners…

Normally around this time of year we would be on a stall at the annual History Day run by the Institute of Historical Research at UCL, which gives researchers a chance to meet staff from libraries,…

An open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century. Independent Voices is made possible by the funding support received from these libraries and donors across the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Through their funding, these libraries and donors are demonstrating their commitment to open access digital collections.

Explore Our Collection of Thousands of Women Peacemaker!

This thesis explores the lives of four British Quaker women—Isabella Ford, Isabel Fry, Margery Fry, and Ruth Fry—focusing on the way they engaged in peace issues in the early twentieth century. In order to examine the complexity and diversity of their experiences, this thesis investigates the characteristics of their Quakerism, pacifism and wider political and personal life, as well as the connections between them. In contrast to O’Donnell’s view that most radical Victorian Quaker women left Quakerism to follow their political pursuits with like-minded friends outside of Quakerism, Isabella Ford, one of the most radical socialists, and feminists among Quakers remained as a Quaker. British Quakers were divided on peace issues but those who disagreed with the general Quaker approach resigned and were not disowned; the case of Isabel Fry is a good example of this. This thesis argues that the experiences of four Quaker women highlight the permissive approach Quakerism afforded its participants in the early twentieth century, challenging previous interpretations of Quakerism as a mono-culture. Highlighting the swift change within Quakerism from being the closed group of the nineteenth to a more open group in the twentieth century, this thesis describes the varied and varying levels of commitment these women had to the group as ‘elastic Quakerism’.

Despite greater societal awareness of sexual inequalities, women are still more likely than men to experience workplace and salary inequity and sexual harassment, and to be victims of male violence. Given this fact, many of the primary goals of second-wave feminism remain largely unrealised. Performing Resistance speaks to feminist discourses and strategies of solidarity that have been overlooked or hidden. It talks back at a moment when museums are taming historical activism through inclusion in survey exhibitions (Soul of a Nation, Tate; Still I Rise, De La Warr). In reframing a creative protest as an artwork, this thesis seeks to extend and rethink the power of resistance by placing emphasis on its activating properties rather than on its ability to be archived in major public institutions. It asks: how does art practice best resist? This practice-led research proposes an act of resistance for reconsideration within this context, one of feminist, all-female and queer protest. It nominates the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (GCWPC; 1981-2000) – its actions, bodies, archives, stories, site and materials – as an expansive and expanding artwork. The thesis does not claim authority or ownership over this singular protest, but instead uses nomination as a means to reconsider feminist practices and values, then and now. In so doing, it asks to what extent art practice can provide a method for engaging with feminist histories, stories and events and how might it allow a productive reevaluation of gender equality. What gets dislodged when the relations between politics, life and art are blurred, and what are the effects of this displacement? The retroactive proposition of Greenham as an artwork locates it not within participatory art practices (Bishop, 2012) or re-enactments, nor inside a virtual museum collated from archival materials (Pollock, 2007) or post-protest artworks (Kokoli, 2018). Rather, the method I propose of talking back to oneself is employed in order to better understand Greenham not as one event but as a means for seeing, thinking and doing – an ‘intersectional’ activist approach (Crenshaw, 2019). As a strategy it exposes the compound discrimination against women, queers and anti nuclear protesters in the past and suggests how dissent in the present can be constrained thereby reducing the capability for taking meaningful, transformative action. Nomination functions here as a mode of ‘backchat’ (Crenshaw), a resistant position that refutes and contests the contemporary prevailing hegemonies within art and politics that can diminish what the Greenham protest was and what it achieved. My own experience of having been a Peace Camp participant is the basis for, and forms an important part of the proposition and analysis of, this research. I use my own archive of materials to generate new responses both in the studio and through writing. I argue the case for nomination of the protest as artwork through three trajectories: the artwork as Gift, as Archive and as Correspondence. In the latter, I employ writing letters to my past self in the present day as a method both of interrogating and of corresponding with memories and objects that trace the history of the protest. My hypothesis is that art can best function when it resists through testing limits, assumptions and boundaries, besides producing aesthetic experiences. Without resistance, art becomes nothing more than decoration, a tradeable commodity. Through nomination-as-artwork, the research reactivates an archive of bodies, voices, events and materials which, through reuse, generates new works and keeps the feminist legacy of the GCWPC potent.

The Swarthmore College Peace Collection documents non-governmental efforts for nonviolent social change, disarmament, and conflict resolution. Established over 90 years ago, the Peace Collection is the most extensive research library and archive collection in the United States focusing solely on movements for peace around the world.