The Star Hotel in Newcastle has become a site of defiance for the marginalized young and dispossessed working class. To understand the whole story of the Star Hotel riot, it should be seen in the context of other moments of resistance such as the 1890 Maritime Strike, Rothbury miners' lockout in 1929 and the recent battle for the Laman Street fig trees. As Australia’s first industrial city, Newcastle is also a natural home of radicalism but until now, the stories which reveal its breadth and impact have remained untold. Radical Newcastlebrings together short illustrated essays from leading scholars, local historians and present day radicals to document both the iconic events of the region’s radical past, and less well known actions seeking social justice for workers, women, Aboriginal people and the environment

A study of place, identity, music, politics and regionalism which calls for a radical restructuring of the British Isles. In the early twenty-first century, "Englishness" suddenly became a hot topic. A rash of art exhibitions, pop albums and coffee table books arrived on the scene, all desperate to recover England’s lost national soul. But when we sweep away the patriotic stereotypes, we begin to see that England is a country that does not — and perhaps should not — exist in any essential sense. In this provocative text combining polemic and memoir, Alex Niven argues that the map of the British Isles should be torn apart completely as we look towards a time of radical political reform. Rejecting outdated nationalisms, Niven argues for a renovated model of culture and governance for the islands — a fluid, dynamic version of regionalism preparing the way for a new "dream archipelago".

"Victoria W. Wolcott argues that utopianism is the little-appreciated base of the visionary worldview that informed the prime movers of the Civil Rights Movement. Idealism and pragmatism, not utopianism, are what tend to come to mind when we think about the motivating philosophies of the movement. It's well-known that many of its iconic moments were carefully executed products of planning, not passion alone. But Wolcott holds that pragmatism and idealism alike were grounded in nothing less than intensely utopian thought. Key figures from Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott to Marjorie Penney and Howard Thurman shared a belief in a radical pacificism that was, Wolcott shows, both specifically utopian and precisely engaged in changing the existing world. Casting mid-twentieth-century civil rights activism in the light of utopianism ultimately allows us to see the power of dreaming in a profound and concrete fashion, one that can be emulated in other times that are desperate for change, like today"--