Progress report on the new Chartist Ancestors

The rebuild of the Chartist Ancestors website is coming on apace. If you would like to see what’s going on, you can find the new site here.

Beware, that for the time being, things are a bit messy. The old site is in the process of demolition, so some links do not work. You can sometimes get round this by checking the URL (the website address) and replacing any capital letters with lower case equivalents.

Time to rebuild Chartist Ancestors - wish me luck

There may be some disruption to the Chartist Ancestors website over the summer. If so, I apologise, and can only suggest you try again later.

I built the site way back in 2003 - long enough ago in real life, but almost into pre-history for a website. But since then, while the site has grown and added pages, photos and other resources, it has not really evolved to keep pace with technology.

Revamp for Chartism online

Take a look at Stephen Roberts’ excellent Chartism and the Chartists website, which has been thoroughly revamped and redesigned of late.

The site now has a weekly blog post, photos and posters, along with an expanded biographical listing of prominent Chartists.

Chartist lives and Chartist histories

Richard Brown, whose book Chartism (Cambridge University Press, 1998) has been a boon to a generation of history students, has now turned his hand to the web, making his expertise available online to a potentially much wider audience.

Using a blog format, his History Zone website is now home to a growing volume of material on the Chartist movement.

The material there breaks down into two main groups:

·     a selection of Chartist Lives, featuring solidly referenced biographies of figures associated with the movement, among them the Newport Chartist Zephaniah Williams, William Lovett (author of the Charter and secretary to the first convention), and the Christian Chartist Arthur Wade; and

·    a series of articles called “Chartism: a question of interpretation” which examine the ways in which Chartism has been interpreted and understood in the 150 years since it ceased to be a force in the land. 

 This latter selection of articles – essentially a history of the history of Chartism – expands and updates the opening section of Richard Brown’s 1998 book