What does radical history look like in a digital era? For the past fifteen years, History Workshop has been trailblazing in historians’ use of the digital to make production and communication of history a radically democratic activity.
Marijn Degenaar, Michael Derringer and I were tasked with redeveloping History Workshop’s website, with the goal of transforming it from an off-the-shelf WordPress site into a more user-friendly and accessible experience. We gave the site a magazine-style front page to show off their latest content and used a custom faceted search to make it easier to browse and search older posts, which had previously been buried deep within their blog. Have a browse through their archive, there’s so much incredible content.
About History Workshop: “As a movement, History Workshop movement was established in 1967, a year before May 1968, that much-studied moment of radical reimagining. The movement sprang from a conviction that ‘history is too important to be left just to professional historians’, as founder Raphael Samuel put it. A workshop is not the academy. In meetings that drew together trade unionists and academics, students and members of the women’s liberation movement, the production of history became ‘a collaborative enterprise’ that was used to inform activism and social justice.”