@mauricejcasey.com
Historian of intimacy and revolution in 1920s-40s Europe. New project: anti-Nazi vegetarians. Author of Irish Book Awards shortlisted HOTEL LUX — about a hotel in 1920s Moscow — and radical history newsletter Archive Rats: archiverats.substack.com
I've got a new article out @parlhistjournal.bsky.social 💥 It's about late 19thC socialist caravan tours & the production of everyday forms of cross-cultural connection & provincial internationalisms that were vital for the development of socialist ideas in this period
back at it*
*posting in the Facebook community group of a rural village because I believe the descendants of a revolutionary couple I am researching may currently reside there.
Coming up this SUNDAY! A true story of family, love and anti-Nazi resistance — researched and presented by yours truly. Live on BBC Radio 4 or listen later on BBC Sounds.
Coming up this SUNDAY! A true story of family, love and anti-Nazi resistance — researched and presented by yours truly. Live on BBC Radio 4 or listen later on BBC Sounds.
Over the last few months I have been learning code/game design with QUB MediaLab - part of a longer term project to create interactive 3D recreations of the historical spaces I research.
Yesterday I began (re)creating a 1930s anti-Nazi London hangout. Consider this very much the "Before" image:
Coming up tomorrow! Excited to see where the conversation takes us
"Readers will struggle to find a more engaging, and engaged, example of public history: accessible to both professionals and non-specialists, beautifully constructed and written, with a tremendous flair for the telling detail"
🙏🙏🙏
www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journal/lhr
There's an extraordinarily kind review of Hotel Lux from Stephen Hopkins in the latest Labour History Review.
Thank you to Stephen for understanding the book's mission: to encounter revolutionaries on their own terms + show how friendship and love was as powerful a motivation as ideology.
Read about Tudor Contemporary at The Heong Gallery, @downingcollege.bsky.social, Cambridge: www.cam.ac.uk/research/new...
what a double bill
On Sun 8 March BBC Radio 4 will broadcast The Alpenpost: A Girl's Guide to Fighting Hitler and Stalin - a documentary based on my research!
It traces how I uncovered the lost archive of an anti-Nazi resistance organiser in a wind-rattled villa on the Galician coast.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
Producer Mark Burman and I travelled to Amsterdam and Spain to reveal details about the most extraordinary source I found: the Alpenpost, a hand-crafted child's newspaper.
It was written from exile by 2 girls, Elisa and Alida, and sent to their papa Edo: head of a continent wide resistance network.
On Sun 8 March BBC Radio 4 will broadcast The Alpenpost: A Girl's Guide to Fighting Hitler and Stalin - a documentary based on my research!
It traces how I uncovered the lost archive of an anti-Nazi resistance organiser in a wind-rattled villa on the Galician coast.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
Really looking forward to this week’s @qubhistory.bsky.social seminar by @mauricejcasey.com! A great title and no doubt a great paper on anti-fascist vegetarians - one not to miss! Snacks and drinks provided. All welcome - in person and online! More information:
www.eventbrite.com/e/qub-histor...
We’re delighted to announce the society's 2026 Distinguished Lecture will be delivered by Prof Tyler Anbinder of George Washington University.
"The Surprising Socio-Economic Mobility of New York’s Great Famine Refugees"
Online, 4pm GMT (11am EST), Thurs. 5 Mar. 2026.
Register here: www.eshsi.org
🔴 The Long View #012
Radicals and the Soviet Union
@mauricejcasey.com on Hotel Lux and the forgotten activists whose lives intersected in 1920s Moscow.
Feb 26 | 11 AM ET
RSVP: zoom.us/webinar/regi...
Totally Chaotic History: Roman Britain Gets Rowdy Tue 17 Feb 2026, 3pm Be astounded by unbelievable and hilarious facts as bestselling author Greg Jenner takes us on a riotously fun journey through Roman Britain Www.southbankcentre.co.uk
For half-term, next Tuesday I’m doing a fun kids’ event at @southbankcentre.bsky.social in London — I’ll be doing a funny talk on the history of Roman Britain, and my ace illustrator @rikinparekh.bsky.social will do a live draw-along tutorial
Tix cheap!
www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/tot...
Belfast! I'm BACK on the seminar circuit with my latest project.
All welcome to join me 20 Feb at 4pm for my talk 'First add oats, then kill Hitler: a recipe for resistance in underground Europe, 1920s-1940s'
Plenty of new findings on the correlation between diet and the desire to resist Nazis.
My essay on the Popular Front is now also available in English via the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung website @rosaluxstiftung.bsky.social www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/5...
This documentary was so much fun to make. It’s compiled from audio we gathered across a couple of years and follows two amazing women - Meg and Dympna - all the way to Jamaica, in search of Meg’s ancestor: an Irish Catholic enslaver and coffee planter, Peter Daly
www.rte.ie/radio/docono...
The notion that I just had a Zoom call with someone who remembers the Lux from the 1930s is truly surreal to me, it's like claiming that I just WhatsApp'ed Ramsay MacDonald.
In the years I've worked on the history of the Hotel Lux in the Comintern era, I never imagined I would ever speak with someone who remembered it.
But last week I received an email from someone who is about to turn 100 - and he had a story to share.
So excited to write up this encounter.
Oh thanks for the clarification!
If you made it this far in the thread, then you are likely a nerd like me, so here's more detail:
In Obsidian, I use the plugins; Templater for note templates, Meta Bind for creating useful data points, Dataview for viewing these, Zotero Integration, File Color + Smart Typography for aesthetics.
I'm not saying this method is for everybody. You really need to enjoy debugging, tinkering, etc. It helps I have a basic understanding of coding logic. And it suits my research.
But if it's something you have long been considering, then all the software to achieve this is free + open source
The game-changing factor for me is the ability to quickly create links between notes so that I can understand connections.
Here, for example, is how I can jump from my notes on one resistance fighter, who was a vegetarian, to notes on the political history of vegetarianism.
The basis of all this is the Zettelkasten note-taking method. I use a reference manager (Zotero for lit, Tropy for archival stuff) for all my reading, then write long-hand notes on my research in my database (Obsidian).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelk...
Picture of a social network graph
I work on profoundly interlinked and intimate social worlds and I needed to carry a graph like this inside my own mind to make sense of the stories I was trying to tell.
With my new method, I have digital backup to my own understanding, allowing me to zoom in and out to understand connections.
Screenshot of primary source notes
When I relied on my Giant Word Doc™ I basically had to combine notes with memory.
If I wanted to write about something, I needed to pray a simple word search could dig up the relevant citation among 100k+ words. I also needed to hope I spelled the word correctly lol.
Using Obsidian (free, open source software) I am creating my own personal Wikipedia of all the people, events, concepts, organisations, etc. central to my research.
