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samwetherell.bsky.social
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 in 2025: https://www.waterstones.com/book/liverpool-and-the-unmaking-of-britain/sam-wetherell//9781801
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Congratulations Sam! I had the chance to see an advance copy of Liverpool and the Un-Making of Britain and it’s strongly recommended - even if, for some peculiar reason, you’re not particularly interested in Liverpool, as it’s really a book about the contemporary nation as a whole.

I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy and this is a must-read book for anyone interested in urban history, the history of capitalism, and British history. It's also a very engaging read. Once I started the Hillsborough chapter I couldn't stop turning the pages.

Congratulations to our Modern Book Reviews Editor @samwetherell.bsky.social on the publication of his second book!

Happy publication day to @samwetherell.bsky.social 's Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain! www.waterstones.com/book/liverpo...

My book - Liverpool and the Un-Making of Britain - is out today! Here is a thread I made earlier of extraordinary facts about the city's history to get everyone excited.

This looks great. www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...

You can listen again to me talk with Adam Ferguson, Yu Jie and Jack Thorne about obsolescence and political and economic abandonment in Liverpool, Northern China, Corby and elsewhere on Start the Week. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Time to take a good look at this new technology which will fix the NHS, repair broken roads, restore economic growth and repair Britain's diplomatic relationship with the United States.

Catch me on Radio 4 at 9am tomorrow! I'll be talking about Liverpool's modern history and how we can forge a new type of politics in the face of abandonment and obsolescence. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

York’s annual Viking Festival again. Time to continually wonder “is that guy a Viking reenactor or is that just what he’s like?”

Seeing a lot of these kinds of takes. Trump is obviously a dangerous, corrupt and mendacious liar, but the "was Churchill a dictator!?" line is not the gotcha it at first seems. Churchill ruled "unelected" over a vast empire some of which was openly in revolt against, and brutally repressed.

The Long Goodbye . . . (realizing neoliberalism is likely no longer a helpful category to understand our present political economic moment)

RIP to the brilliant, pioneering Marika Sherwood. Her work was a big on my latest book, particularly this wonderful account of the role of Liverpool shipping companies in draining resources from West Africa. www.jstor.org/stable/221228

As a reference, the $46B that Meta spent building this shit is about the same amount of money Spain used to built its WHOLE high speed rail network. All 2469 miles of it. Zuckerberg got that money selling shitty ads and destroying democracy, and gave the world this.

Trying to imagine how it would have felt if you had told me in 2015, as I was listening to Art Angels on a road trip through California, that ten years later Grimes’ child would be wiping his snot on the resolution desk of the Oval Office.

This makes me think that academia as a professional calling has like five years left at best.

I'd previously thought that the difference between Labour and Tory/far right border violence was affect - Labour would "manage" the border with a technocratic and at times reluctant disposition while the right would gleefully perform the cruelty for a libidinal payoff. Now I'm not so sure.

Growing Up and Going Out is released with @manchesterup.bsky.social TODAY! If you're interested in histories of youth, leisure, drinking, urban space, and oral history then please do consider ordering a copy for your libraries. manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526152640/

Come to Liverpool Waterstones on 12 March, where I'll be in conversation with the great Lynsey Hanley about my new book! www.waterstones.com/events/sam-w...

Reading @samwetherell.bsky.social 's incredible book Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain while trying to reach a distant hospital in Manchester and dealing with terrible transport system to get there: It all makes sense!

People are saying this the Home Office's vile deportation videos are a tactical blunder that hands votes to Reform. Maybe. But we should oppose this pointless performance of naked, cruelty regardless of its electoral consequences. Even, and perhaps especially, if it was "popular".

Playing around with ChatGPT before teaching this week and this is pretty extraordinary. My humble paper on national garden festivals and urban planning is summarised as being about being settler colonial agricultural policy, something I have never written about.

Tout ce que vous avez toujours voulu savoir sur #Liverpool sans jamais oser le demander. À dérouler👇

Shocked to find that honours, named after one of the largest and most brutal empires the world has ever seen and bestowed by an unelected feudal head of state might be a poor instrument for resolving deep structural inequalities in modern Britain. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...