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Sam Wetherell

@samwetherell.bsky.social
2.6K followers 645 following 916 posts

Historian of Britain and the World at the University of York. Interested in cities, art-making and the future. Liverpool and the Un-Making of Britain out now: www.samwetherell.com

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Reposted by Sam Wetherell
Chika Tonooka @chikatonooka.bsky.social · 16h
Just set up Bluesky... because my book is now out in the US and as an e-book. (Coming to the UK on 1 December!) 30% discount code P329 at press.princeton.edu. @princetonupress.bsky.social
press.princeton.edu
Rival Civilisations
How British intellectuals of the twentieth century reckoned with the emergence of an Asian power
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Fiction only, for obvious reasons.
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
A predictable reflection of my historically specific formation
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
FREE BOOKS* *if you write a review for @urbanhistory.bsky.social
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Reposted by Sam Wetherell
Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I wrote about the art critic John Berger and the strange thing we call the "creative economy" thehistoryfactory.substack.com/p/john-berge...
thehistoryfactory.substack.com
John Berger, Liverpool and the “Creative Economy”
“Socrates’ dictum that beauty is the useful has at last been ironically fulfilled.” Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Caroline Rose Peyton, Radioactive Dixie: A Nuclear History of the American South
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Cindy Anh Nguyen, Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Eva Payne, Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Paul Knox, Lost London
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Ching Kwan Lee, Forever Hong Kong: A Global City's Decolonisation Struggle
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Ann Elias, The Underharbour: Submerged Histories of Sydney
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Ruby Oram, Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870–1930
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Emilio de Antuñano, The Politics of Informality: Housing and Planning in Mexico City
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
David E. Barclay Cold War City: A History of West Berlin
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Joshua Specht, Property Values: The Rise and Fall of the American Homeowner
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The leaves are turning, terms are starting and I am once again looking for people interested in reviewing some wonderful looking books for @urbanhistory.bsky.social - if any of these take your fancy, get in touch. Beginning with Flora Wilson's fabulous looking Operatic Infrastructures.
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I wrote about the art critic John Berger and the strange thing we call the "creative economy" thehistoryfactory.substack.com/p/john-berge...
thehistoryfactory.substack.com
John Berger, Liverpool and the “Creative Economy”
“Socrates’ dictum that beauty is the useful has at last been ironically fulfilled.” Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
The anthropologist Anna Tsing on cooking fish.
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
All the news that’s fit to print! www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/2656231...
yorkpress.co.uk
University of York academic in running for prestigious history award
Dr Sam Wetherell, senior lecturer at the University of York, has been shortlisted for the 2026 Wolfson History Prize for Liverpool: A Story of…
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
It’s true, the second baby is easier. And you have all the skills stored up from first time around. Like how to make a pretty decent negroni with one hand.
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Reposted by Sam Wetherell
David Veevers @davidveevers.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Think of the combined CENTURIES of expertise lost here, the creativity, the knowledge, the depth and breadth of cultural learning and understanding, the generations of minds enriched and enlightened, the sheer weight of history that led to the establishment of these programmes. Purged. Destroyed.
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Reposted by Sam Wetherell
Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
“Don’t bring a union rep” is one of those sentences that always means your employer is going you treat you with respect and dignity
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Reposted by Sam Wetherell
Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Some incredibly exciting news! My book about how Liverpool's history makes us think differently about Britain's past, present and future has been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize!
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I'm hugely grateful to the judges and honoured to be on such a distinguished shortlist of historians.
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Some incredibly exciting news! My book about how Liverpool's history makes us think differently about Britain's past, present and future has been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize!
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Great day to remember that Michel de Certeau’s most famous essay, ‘Walking in the City’, was inspired by the observation tower at the top of the World Trade Center.
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Reposted by Sam Wetherell
Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
My latest post: On the deindustrialisation of the university. And on being "in defence of history" at a time of extinction. thehistoryfactory.substack.com/p/the-histor...
thehistoryfactory.substack.com
The History Factory 2: The Deindustrialisation of the University
A few years ago, my employer, the University of York, commissioned a civil engineering firm named Tilbury Douglas to build a new nursery for the children of its employees and students.
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
My latest post: On the deindustrialisation of the university. And on being "in defence of history" at a time of extinction. thehistoryfactory.substack.com/p/the-histor...
thehistoryfactory.substack.com
The History Factory 2: The Deindustrialisation of the University
A few years ago, my employer, the University of York, commissioned a civil engineering firm named Tilbury Douglas to build a new nursery for the children of its employees and students.
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Tonight!
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
I only subscribed for Severance and unsubscribed the day it finished but willing to reactivate!
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
I am once again the parent of a newborn. Which means, among a million other things big and small, that I am in the market for absorbing television, disaster movies, intellectually interesting horror movies.
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Happy September 1 from Bruno Schulz
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
I’ll be on Radio 4 next week talking about the stupidity of charter cities and the barbarism of libertarian world making www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
bbc.co.uk
BBC Sounds - Rethink, Rethink... the future of cities
Could charter cities be the key to urban prosperity and opportunity?
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Yes please! Hope you enjoy it
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Liverpool Waterstones ❤️
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Reposted by Sam Wetherell
Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
On the eve of my paternity leave, I have made a Substack for intermittent reflections on the strange new work that history is being made to do in Britain. The first essay is about York Dungeon, carnivalesque violence and the past as a scrapheap. thehistoryfactory.substack.com/p/the-histor...
thehistoryfactory.substack.com
The History Factory 1: York Dungeon and the Junkyard Past
“The living need the dead more than the dead need the living” Thomas Laqueur
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
On the eve of my paternity leave, I have made a Substack for intermittent reflections on the strange new work that history is being made to do in Britain. The first essay is about York Dungeon, carnivalesque violence and the past as a scrapheap. thehistoryfactory.substack.com/p/the-histor...
thehistoryfactory.substack.com
The History Factory 1: York Dungeon and the Junkyard Past
“The living need the dead more than the dead need the living” Thomas Laqueur
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
I think this is what Gramsci meant by “morbid symptoms”
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Liverpool University Press @livunipress.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
We're pleased to share the details of Professor Stephen Small's upcoming UK and Ireland book tour for his new book Black Liverpool, 'The real thing': West African, West Indian and Afro-American culture at the end of the twentieth century.
Promotional poster for Stephen Small's Black Liverpool 2026 book tour. The poster features the book cover alongside the title "Black Liverpool" in large gold lettering on a dark blue background. Tour dates and venues listed are: 1 October, Writing on the Wall at Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre, Liverpool; 6 October, Africa Centre, University of Sussex; 8 October, New Beacon Books, London; 13 October, House of Commons, London; 15 October, Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity, University of Manchester; 17 October, Liverpool Literary Festival; 19 October, Centre for the Study of International Slavery, University of Liverpool; 20 October, University of Glasgow; 22 October, University of Edinburgh; 28 October, Maynooth University and Trinity College Dublin; and 30 October, Queen's University Belfast. Website: www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk.
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Reposted by Sam Wetherell
Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
I reviewed Brian Harrison's Yesterday: Britain from Thatcher to Covid for the Times Literary Supplement. I found it rich and useful but it also an attempt to contain and diffuse rather than to critically interrogate the the history of the last forty years. www.the-tls.com/history/twen...
the-tls.com
This just in
My students often ask me how old something has to be to be considered history. They are usually searching for an agreed cut-off point between the surface-level churn of present events and a past that ...
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Main takeaways here:
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
I reviewed Brian Harrison's Yesterday: Britain from Thatcher to Covid for the Times Literary Supplement. I found it rich and useful but it also an attempt to contain and diffuse rather than to critically interrogate the the history of the last forty years. www.the-tls.com/history/twen...
the-tls.com
This just in
My students often ask me how old something has to be to be considered history. They are usually searching for an agreed cut-off point between the surface-level churn of present events and a past that ...
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Brits will merrily watch vast parts of the Amazon, Siberia, California, Ontario and Australia burn and parts of South Asia and the Middle East hit near life threatening wet bulb temperatures then have their views on emissions changed by a BBC news package about a small wildfire in Stourbridge.
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
This is clearly good news. But the fact that a hotter than average summer can have such an effect is real evidence of just how terrible British people are at abstracting from their own immediate experience or thinking about their condition in global terms.
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Does anyone remember when, in 2023, Rachel Reeves, soon to become chancellor, was found to have plagiarised multiple parts of a book she published about economics from Wikipedia and it was barely a news story?
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Woohoo!
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Reposted by Sam Wetherell
Olivia Wyatt @oliviawyatt1999.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
My article — “Black is Beautiful”: Gender, Pigmentation, and Political Blackness in Modern Britain — is now available to read! It reinserts the politics of complexion into our narratives of the Black Power and Black Women’s movements. #BlackBritishHistory academic.oup.com/histres/adva...
academic.oup.com
‘Black is beautiful’: gender, pigmentation and political blackness in modern Britain*
Abstract. By examining political literature, ephemera and oral histories, this article investigates the politics of pigmentation within the Black Power and
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Extraordinary this, on life after order, the shift from hegemony to domination and the contagious proliferation of populations rendered surplus from the slums of the global south to Gaza to Britain. An expression of some of what I tried to historicise in Liverpool and the Un-Making of Britain.
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nataliethomlinson.bsky.social @nataliethomlinson.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Chuffed to see my article on feminist responses to the unemployment crisis of the 1980s out in JBS:
cambridge.org
“Women, Where Are Your Jobs Going?”: Feminism and the Problem of Unemployment in Thatcher’s Britain | Journal of British Studies | Cambridge Core
“Women, Where Are Your Jobs Going?”: Feminism and the Problem of Unemployment in Thatcher’s Britain - Volume 65
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