Robert Poole

I am a professional historian based in Manchester. The first space age, the future of my youth, is now history, and I have become its historian. My latest book is the expanded second edition of ‘Earthrise: a short history of the whole Earth’, the remarkable story of the first views of Earth from space. Originally published by Yale, the kindle edition at long last has colour pictures, some of them published nowhere else. For a preview, see my piece on ‘Blue Marble’ at theconversation.com, on 31 Jan. 2023.

I also do ground-based history. ‘Peterloo: the English Uprising’ (Oxford UP, 2019) marked the bicentenary of the ‘Peterloo massacre’, a landmark event in the history of British democracy which took place in Manchester in 1819 and the subject of the Mike Leigh film. I was the consultant historian to the bicentenary programme, and also to the 400th anniversary of the trial of the Lancashire (or Pendle) witches in 1612. My book ‘The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the county of Lancashire (Carnegie, 2011) is IMHO the best short guide to England’s biggest peacetime witch trial.

For more on all this and a contact e-mail, please see my website at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, where I am Professor of History.