‘If once, why not again?’ Rediscovering Freddy Anderson

A new pamphlet restores the writing of Freddy Anderson to popular attention. Erin Farley, Scottish folk scholar and Local History Officer for Dundee Libraries, explores his rich and living legacy. (Erin can be found on Twitter at @aliasmacalias) Let us Act for Ourselves: Selected Works of Freddy Anderson Edited by Joey Simons (Platform Arts, 2020) …

How Thatcherite was the Right to Buy? Scottish home ownership and working-class aspiration from the 1970s

The Right to Buy may have been implemented by the Thatcher government, but something very much like it was contemplated by Labour-controlled bodies in Scotland a decade earlier.

Negotiated Communities: Why the History of Community Action in Scotland Matters

Although the labour movement in Scotland has been the subject of much important and instructive research, the activities of smaller, less formal and often short-lived community groups have received far less attention.

Before ‘Coutherisation’: Poetry and Politics in the Dundee Press

Politics, poetry and journalism were inextricable in Victorian Dundee. Erin Farley argues that the legacy of D.C Thomson’s kitsch, de-politicised publications has overshadowed the city’s more complex, often radical journalistic heritage, where popular literature could be poetic, political and far from parochial.