Started my Year 12 history lesson today by asking my class if there was anything from the reading that surprised, interested or confused them. I took my glasses to clean them, expecting the usual fumbling, murmurs and questions to slowly emerge... how wrong was I?!!

A hand shot up. "Lets look at that 'white lives matter' source!" It's fair to say sources don't always evoke such excitement in my classrooms but I'd done over a year of preparation for this course and for the life of me couldn't recall including anything of the sort...

"take me to the page" I asked, and we found it. It was this one - which I'd picked out & always read as William Cobbett doing an 1820s UKIP impersonation. They - as #GenZ - read it more literally as a 'White Lives Matter'.

We looked at it in partnership with this revealing if odious satire by Cruikshank - note the 'hard-pinched' white people and the joyous, enslaved Black people. This was a past that was present in the classroom and it was coming alive for my students...

But we weren't being anachronistic. We brought out the assumption that Cobbett's 'hard-pinched' working-class were the most racist and rabid of all British supporters of Slavery that my students hold. But this was disrupted by the next source - Cobbett in 1831...

Cobbett - like a petulant child - is obsessed with making the point that his poor constituents are worse off than the enslaved. AND YET he readily admits here that HIS CONSTITUENTS have shifted him to vote for abolition of Slavery. Which one is it William?

Finally we ended with this extract from the wonderful Mary Prince - so measured in its retort of Cobbett & his like- who odiously presented slavery as 'singing & dancing'. The students wanted to empathise with the likes of Prince and the energy it must have taken to deal w/ this.

They were clearly thinking about the spirit it takes people of colour in this country when they hear #AllLivesMatter and have to provide measured responses. Solidarity can exist across time as well as across borders...

All in all a great hour of learning (for us all) - and we haven't even got to Thomas Carlyle, Eyre and the Morant Bay War!