Befriending the Dead: History, Friendship, and Talking Across Time

Abstract People in Britain are lonely; Britain is also one of the most age-segregated countries in the world. These realities create generational antagonisms that play out with often dangerous consequences, particularly for the most marginalized. This article considers how history, in its practice and in its subjects, can reveal the relational and reparative function of cross-generational solidarities. It explores histories of radical friendship in the nineteenth century and today to argue that history itself is a form of intergenerational friendship. History, like friendship, can be a politically powerful way of talking and learning across time, connecting past, present, and future struggle.