Found in today’s NYT: an example of domestic writing “in the wild”. In a deeply personal look at the home of F. Murray Abraham includes this photo of his granddaughter’s height chart and what it means to both of them. A testament to the importance of these artefacts as archives of family life!

A beautiful piece by Aisha Marjara. Am I the Skinniest Person You’ve Ever Seen? www.nytimes.com/video/opinio...

Clicking "submit" 50+ times and nothing is submitted. Signing in 100+ times. Repeatedly uploading all the clunky PDFs that refuse to attach. It's entirely possible I'm responsible for crashing the @sshrc-crsh.canada.ca website.

Amazing venue, so many interesting papers, lovely chats with new friends, cool streets to walk down, and proper fish and chips. Thank you @socialhistsoc.bsky.social for the opportunity to attend and present in the UK for the first time. #shsconf2025

Karen Harvey's lovely #SHSconf2025 keynote on 'trifling' letters in the c18th has me wanting to compose all my WhatsApp messages as little letters, with all their care for language, for a while. Since I basically only message my wife she in particular will be suffering.

Thank you to all who came out for our last panel on the last day. Such good discussions and many thanks to @zoejackson.bsky.social and our chair Leo Shipp for the generous and thoughtful discussion afterward. It was a great wrap up to #SHSConf2025

Thanatourism with Pippa Catterall. I’m not up for public executions but never miss a cemetery if I can help it! #SHCConf2025

Now I’m really ready. #SHSConf2025 #lastdaypanel

Day 2 conclusion: holding a conference at a living history museum with time to explore, eat, and play is an inspired choice. #SHSConf2025

Thrilled to be listening to Prof Karen Harvey, who is giving the keynote at #SHSConf2025! Fascinating discussion of the ways in which letter-writers in 18th-century Britain 'belittled' their letters - and why! 🗃️✉️📜

To be fair, a chippy tea and then access to the fairground makes for a pretty epic first night of a conference! #SHSConf2025

Thoroughly enjoyed (and madly scribbled many notes) Domestic Interiors and Everyday Materiality panel with @emilycuming.bsky.social, @annaannawalsh.bsky.social and @luciejones83.bsky.social Material culture of the home in three very different contexts, all of them fascinating! #SHSConf2025

Fantastic roundtable at the #SHSConf2025 on material culture! Featuring four fabulous speakers - @simonbriercliffe.bsky.social on @bclivingmuseum.bsky.social; @timhitchcock.bsky.social on convict tokens; @anahowie.bsky.social on portraiture & pearl fisheries & Simon Morgan on radical pottery✨

Last night’s material culture roundtable was a definite highlight, with an excellent introduction to collections and methodology of the Black Country Living Museum. #SHSConf2025

I really should have honed my elevator pitch prior to being asked what my research is about. Are you familiar with marginalia in books? I research marginalia in vernacular domestic dwellings. I’ll be presenting on Wednesday! #SHSConf2025

Arrived for some @socialhistsoc.bsky.social pre-conference touring of @bclivingmuseum.bsky.social. It took all of about 10 minutes for the room with the hob and pink transferware to find me #SHSConf2025

One more sleep! (for those who lose a day flying) I simply cannot wait to meet some new people, and present my paper alongside some really fascinating researchers and their ideas (queer magic? scientific housewifery? memory and materiality of retirement gifts?) #SHSConf2025

It’s here! Objects of Poverty: Material Culture in Britain from 1700 www.bloomsbury.com/uk/objects-o...

So much of why I find domestic marginalia exciting is articulated here by Edmund de Waal. “The building…is itself an archive…Text is everywhere—a name is written…A date, and then another and another, carved into the doorway or painted high above your head, kinds of reckonings.”

Not buying U.S. doesn’t hurt that much. Other losses remind me of those good parts of American culture that have been influential in my 🇨🇦 life. Solo trips to NYC, that time in undergrad I got to spend a week at Harvard doing research. Childhood memories of PBS. NPR. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/u...

I'm really excited to share this fun little piece I wrote for the Society for the History of Children and Youth's Digital Childhoods Blog - I've fallen in love with little shoes and hope you do too! shcydigitalchildhoods.org/dir/shoes-sh...

Spanning over a century, #IsleOfMan planning records constitute our most widely-used #ArchiveCollection. Casting light on the history of properties and the people connected to them, these records also work in tandem with other collections in our archive to aid research. #Archive30 #ManxArchives

Building as palimpsest. The wonderful edited volume Palimpsests: Buildings, Sites, Time puts it so well. The building as palimpsest brings a fourth dimension—that of duration—essential to understanding architecture and sites as historic and contemporary entities.

This thread reminds me of reading Derrida in my undergrad and the feeling it was the assigned reading equivalent of that dream where someone is chasing you and you’re trying to phone for help but none of the buttons work. In French.

Sprouts are good in some applications but as a daily consumer of salad I’ve become like Red from Shawshank and can track down non-US lettuce anytime, anywhere. We grow greenhouse lettuce all year round right here in Ontario!

Listen, it shouldn’t take a global crisis to bust out the turnips. Have you ever slow-roasted a whole turnip (or rutabaga, or celeriac, or kohlrabi) and eaten it with some vinaigrette and/or crème fraîche?

The brewery at Dundurn Castle was restored in 1967 as a centennial project, with artifacts sourced from the Ontario countryside, and funded by Labatt, who restored their original brewery at the same time. In 1835, rainwater was stored in cisterns below the castle for bathing; beer was for drinking.

The April issue of the CHA's digital newsletter, Historians' Corner, is now online! #cdnhist #skystorians cha-shc.ca/publications...

Watercolour by former Manitoba provincial architect Gilbert Parfitt of the now-demolished flour mill that used to be on Archibald in St. Boniface (undated).

There are now a number of incredible folks from the NEH & state humanities councils who will be looking for jobs. They are humanities leaders, strategists, thinkers. You want them on your team.

Just realized I have a paper in peer-review at an NEH funded journal. As a new grad student, this would have been my first publication. Students, grantees, and at the top of the list, NEH staff. All fuckered. www.historians.org/news/nationa...

Continuing the weird trend of things I'm researching/talking about showing up in my inbox. I recently completed research on the global history of American Chinatowns. Today, treated to this post with its delightful vintage menu. - By Ruth Reichl | La Briffe ruthreichl.substack.com/p/insiders-g...

Celebrating DH excellence is vitally important, especially now. Have a Canadian researcher (or a researcher at a Canadian institution) whose contributions should be celebrated? Nominations are open until April 11th. 🇨🇦 🇨🇦 🇨🇦 #canadianDH

I can’t explain, but sometimes a grad seminar in global history drifts into a food history discussion about jellied salads and then a week later this crops up in my inbox. open.substack.com/pub/historic...

Yes to accommodations with at least a small kitchen and a fridge, and in a neighbourhood where you can shop a local grocery store. Some of the best things I’ve eaten while travelling came from the grocery store. Pistachio buffalo milk yogurt in Florence rings a particular bell.

Only had a chance to skim but digging it so far

Hello #FragmentFriday, have a nice bird! c. 1810 "New Hampshire Bird" wallpaper fragments, Cooper Hewitt 1998-75-207-a,b 🗞️

Interested in the history of museums, archives, historical societies, and public history in the Guelph region? Next Tuesday (April 1) the Guelph Historical Society @guelphhistsoc.bsky.social hosts a presentation on that topic, focusing on the roles of women. Free, at the Guelph Museum. #cdnhist

So excited to be heading to the UK in July to present at SHS. On day 3 I’ll be talking domestic marginalia (what IS that?) and heritage preservation. Looking forward to meeting some new friends and hearing as many of these fascinating talks as I can cram in.

“On April 19th, I made bread.” …and other seemingly banal pronouncements on the walls of Ancient Rome are are fascinating little stories of the people who lived there. If you dig historical archeology then the Ancient Graffiti Project is the special kind of rabbit hole you’ve been longing for.

And the second of our speakers at Hidden Charms 5 will be Dafydd Wiliam who will be discussing the ritual marks which can be found in buildings at St Fagan's Museum. www.apotropaios.co.uk/2025-hidden-...

Thank you so much @bcky.bsky.social for sharing this advert with me. Seeing the height chart painted over broke my heart a little but that’s the reason I do this work, to hopefully preserve these ephemeral domestic artifacts.

When I photographed the breathtaking medieval bell tower at St. Augustine, Brookland, Kent in the Walland Marsh - I had no idea that my camera would reveal a remarkable secret inside the timbers... #thread @folkmagicman.bsky.social

A lovely story of living in the apartments of a Carnegie Library. What could be more magical? www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/r... Guelph’s Carnegie Library, demolished 1964.

First published in 1968 the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada was a handbook for Americans were considering immigrating to Canada. In print once again.... houseofanansi.com/products/man...

Good thing our voter registration cards arrived today.

Join Rural History Roundtable on Weds March 12 (330-5pm EST) as Kimberley Moore and @janisthiessen.bsky.social from University of Winnipeg present "Mmm...Manitoba: The Stories Behind the Food We Eat" Register for this free Zoom talk here: www.eventbrite.ca/e/mmm-manito... All are welcome! #cdnhist

Looking forward to the online #EMROCTranscribes panel on 7 March (5-6 pm UK/12-1 EST): Women Talking, Women's Health. We will answer questions about #EarlyModern women's health. Details on booking here: emroc.hypotheses.org/transcribath... #WomensHistoryMonth +

Coming up in March, we look forward to hosting this year's 'History and Archives in Practice' day conference, on Weds 5th, with partners @ihr.bsky.social and The National Archives bit.ly/3XlcLbW #HAP25's theme is ‘Working with Memory', with contributions from historians and archivists #Skystorians

It’s great to see the flood of academic folks leaving platforms that no longer serve the sharing of ideas in safe or meaningful ways. Here’s an extension to find your followers on Bluesky! lifehacker.com/tech/use-thi...