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Forgotten Hero: The Life & Times of Edward Rushton
Bill Hunter £6.00
Restoring a heroic figure to his place in Liverpool's history of the 18th & early 19th centuries.
Rushton was an uncompromising opponent of slavery, who became blind at the age of 19. He wrote poetry and was a revolutionary republican, supporting the American war for independence, the French Revolution, and the struggles of the Polish & Irish people.
He also founded the world's first school for the blind, which later moved to the building now occupied by the Merseyside Trade Union, Community & Unemployed Resource Centre.
Living History Library (2002) ISBN 095420770x
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Black Liverpool: The Early History of Britain's Oldest Black Community 1730-1918
Ray Costello £9.00
The fascinating story of Liverpool's centuries-old Black community. Early settlers ranged from freed slaves and black servants to the student sons and daughters of African rulers, who had visited the port from at least the 1730s
In this book the names, faces and personalities are added to these early forgotten Black British.
Picton Press (2001) ISBN 1873245076
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The Merseyside Scots
Alasdair Munro & Duncan Sim £9.75
The authors share the same Scottish grandparents who settled on Merseyside, and this interest led them to the research that resulted in this book which sets out to show how much this area owes to its Scottish settlers, a migrant community that was previously under-researched.
Liver Press (2001) ISBN 1871201101
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The Cameo Conspiracy: a Shocking True Story of Murder & Injustice
George Kelly £9.95
Revised & updated edition of the first & definitive book on the notorious Cameo Cinema murder case. It stands in its own right as a classic exposure of a scandalous miscarriage of justice. But the authentically evoked atmosphere of the city's pubs, post-war rationing, illicit shebeens, the black market, and its portrayal of the colourful and seedy characters of Liverpool's underworld, also make it a compelling social chronicle of the period.
Upstage (2001) ISBN 0954161505
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The Life and Times of Kitty Wilkinson
Michael Kelly £7.00
The story of a remarkable woman who fought poverty and adversity to become a legend in her time. Living in a poor part of Liverpool plagued by cholera, she disregarded her own safety to care for the sick and dying, to take in homeless children and to teach that cleanliness was the main weapon against disease, turning her own home into a wash-house for her neighbours' benefit.
Countyvise (2000) ISBN 187120108x
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Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism
John Belchem £11.95
Once the second city of empire, now reduced by economic & demographic decline to European Union Objective One status, Liverpool defies historical categorisation. The essays in this book show how a sense of apartness has always been crucial to Liverpool's identity. While repudiated by others as an external imposition, a stigma from the days of the slave trade or the Irish famine, Liverpool's 'otherness' has been upheld (and inflated) in self-referential myth, a 'Merseypride' that has shown considerable ingenuity in adjusting to the city's changing fortunes.
Liverpool University Press (2000) ISBN 0853237255
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Discovering Historic Wavertree: Village and Garden Suburb
Mike Chitty £4.95
A guide to the history of the Liverpool suburb that is one of the oldest settlements in Merseyside.
Three miles from Liverpool city centre, Wavertree is much older than the other suburbs that surround it. Although eventually swallowed up in Liverpool's 19th century expansion, the village of Wavertree predates the existence of Liverpool itself, appearing in the Domesday Book as the Anglo-Saxon manor of 'Wauretreu', and artefacts dating back to the Bronze Age have been unearthed in the area.
The Wavertree Society (1999) ISBN 0953644103
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An Illustrated Everyday History of Liverpool & Merseyside
£6.95
A real history of Liverpool and Merseyside - not dull remote facts but what happened to the people, brimming with life! Based largely on facsimiles from Gore's Directories, which were published almost continuously from the 18th century, and which from 1813 included the Liverpool Annals. Besides listing the shipwrecks, drownings and fires that made frequent news, the Annals provide a fascinating picture of the social and commercial life of Liverpool in the 18th & 19th centuries. The book is amply illustrated with reproductions of many archive documents and historic maps and pictures.
Scouse Press (1998) ISBN 0901367346
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A History of Lancashire (hardback)
Alan Crosby £15.99
(Apologies for putting this title under 'Merseyside'!)
Concise, but comprehensive, and splendidly illustrated - the entire story of Lancashire from the prehistoric to the present day; from stone circles to superstores, from the Romans to the Beatles. Developments in Lancashire between 1780 and 1880 were instrumental in creating the modern world, but the centuries preceding industrialisation and also the traumatic upheavals and changes of the 20th century are also given their rightful place in the story of the historic county.
Phillimore (1998) ISBN 1860770703
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Liverpool & Slavery: An Historical Account of the Liverpool African Slave Trade
'Dicky Sam' £4.95
Facsimile reprint of a book first published in 1884, at a time when the British slave trade had been dead for more than 50 years, but many of the slave traders and captains who commanded the slave ships would still have been alive. (Which is probably why the author used a pseudonym - 'Dicky Sam' being an old Lancashire nickname for a Liverpool man). It is a history of Liverpool's extensive involvement in the slave trade, how the city's wealth was bound up with the trade, and also looks at those who opposed it.
Scouse Press (1998) ISBN 090136732x
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Steel, Ships & Men: Cammell Laird 1824-1993
Kenneth Warren £15.95
Since the 1960s Britain has suffered a wholesale destruction of its traditional basic industries, and among those most affected has been steel-making and ship-building. This is the first study of the growth, crisis and eventual failure of a one-time major member of these trades, illustrated with a wide range of previously unpublished etchings, photographs and maps. Cammell Laird originated in a boiler works on the edge of Wallasey Pool in 1824 and a steel and file operation in Sheffield 13 years later. These ventures eventually merged, and went from strength to strength until the late 1950s, when they were hit by increased competition and deepening problems, and in 1993 the once-great Birkenhead shipyard closed.
Liverpool University Press (1998) ISBN 0853239223
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Liverpool City of the Sea
Tony Lane £9.95
Liverpool has been shaped by its past dependence on ships and seaborne trade to an extent unequalled by other British cities.
In a unique analysis, former merchant seaman Tony Lane shows how a city with a distinctive social character was produced out of
the interaction of the structures and everyday experiences of shipowners and seafarers, merchants and dockers.
'...Tony Lane has succeeded in encapsulating Liverpool's unique spirit, while at the same time charting its beginnings, the rise and decline of
its "old families", its hideous poverty, its great wealth, its inability to adapt.'
George Melly
Liverpool University Press (1997) ISBN 0853237905
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Liverpool Heritage Walk
£3.95
An illustrated guide for visitors to Liverpool city centre. From the east bank of the river Mersey to the high ridge on which the two cathedrals proudly stand, the city centre boasts some of the finest architecture in the country.
Bluecoat Press (1996) ISBN 1872568254
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The Disinherited Society: A Personal View of Social Responsibility in Liverpool During the 20th Century
Margaret Simey £11.95
In the early years of the 20th century a unique vision of what it meant to be a citizen in an urban democracy emerged in Liverpool, infused by the passion and urgency of women's demand for liberation. This book considers how this has developed into a demand for the empowerment of the community. Ironically the Welfare State has resulted in an assumption of control by the executive which has deprived citizens of their right to responsibility for what is done in their name. The Disinherited Family of Eleanor Rathbone's classic book on child allowances has become the Disinherited Society of today.
A participant in the events she describes, Margaret Simey served her apprenticeship under Eleanor Rathbone and was the first student on the social science degree course pioneered by the University of Liverpool, and subsequently a voluntary worker and local politician.
Liverpool University Press (1996) ISBN 0853238006
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Charity Rediscovered: A Study of Philanthropic Effort in 19th Century Liverpool
Margaret Simey £8.50
Classic study, absorbing and highly praised, first published in 1951. Not just a period piece about 'good works' in the 1800s, its concern is with the remarkable response of a developing urban society to the demands made upon it by rapid growth and change. Through this response, the concept of the relief of poverty as a moral option for the individual changed to that of collective responsibility for the welfare of the community as a whole, a responsibility later assumed by the Welfare State.
Liverpool University Press (1992) ISBN 0853230781
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Genuinely Seeking Work: Mass Unemployment on Merseyside in the 1930s
Merseyside Socialist Research Group £7.95
The decline of world trade following the Wall Street Crash in 1929 dealt grievous blows to Liverpool's economy. The roots of the economic crisis and the role of successive governments in aggravating it by their economic policies forms the first part of this book. The focus then shifts to the unemployed themselves - who they were and how they were treated by the State. Drawing on a variety of sources and written in a popular style, this is a reminder of the real experience of life on the dole.
Liver Press (1992) ISBN 1871201047
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Idle Hands, Clenched Fists: The Depression in a Shipyard Town
Stephen F Kelly £4.95
When riots erupted on the streets of Liverpool in 1981, born out of the frustration and boredom of unemployment, some observers had seen it all before. In the autumn of 1932, those on the dole in Birkenhead had reacted similarly. For a week they had battled with local police as their frustration finally reached breaking point. So many stories of these earlier riots have been passed down by word of mouth, much of it to become myth. This book is the first to record in detail the events of that autumn on Merseyside.
Spokesman (1988) ISBN 0851244467
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