Today we are celebrating #Railway200, as 200 years ago, #OTD 1825, the Stockton & Darlington Railway opened. To mark this milestone, we thought we’d look at some of the ways Parliament and the railways have intersected in the last 200 years: (🧵 1/6) @victoriancommons.bsky.social

Professorship of Economic History University of Cambridge - Faculty of Economics #skystorians 🗃️www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOS980/p...

For anyone who is #teaching #18thcentury politics and/or electoral culture, or is doing #localhistory or #familyhistory, do check out our ECPPEC web resource : it's chock-full of short informative essays, polling data, and artefacts #skystorians ecppec.ncl.ac.uk

UK universities take note: “95% of organisations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies.”

Really good news!

Can confirm.

'Even when women were mentioned, the report found they were more often victims than protagonists, with the women murdered by Jack the Ripper more likely to be taught in lessons than the female code breakers at Bletchley Park during the second world war 1/2

I'm very pleased to announce that the call for proposed Special Issues of the Historical Journal is now live, with a deadline of 12th December. Please do spread widely among your networks — @saracaputo.bsky.social and I look forward to reading your submissions! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The journal Victorians (formerly The Victorian Newsletter) is out, with new format and new editor Kristen Pond, featuring a forum on amateurism and professionalization in science with intro by @aktange.bsky.social. Some terrific work here, and all is Open Access. muse.jhu.edu/issue/55573 #C19th

Incredible stuff

A short post about the Modern British City, out in November: www.lundhumphries.com/blogs/featur...

Google AI doesn’t understand how borders work

Useful reminder from Peter Kellner on the problems we refuse to acknowledge are getting better, and the politics of hopelessness that this breeds open.substack.com/pub/kellnerp...

We have two jobs at KCL History! 16-month post in Modern Irish and/or British History: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOU178/l... And 5-year post in Early Modern Europe & The World: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOU182/l... (both to start in January 2026)

It's quite incredible that this Covid exposé hasn't dominated the UK headlines today. A classic story of ministers taking voluable credit for their "lifesaving decisions", and then insisting that all of the disastrous PPE contracts were the work of officials... www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

Complete nonsense. A hallucination of an event that hasn't even taken yet. And yet, Google faces no sanction for this sort of disinformation, neither of the financial, nor of the regulatory kind.

3. 45 year old mother of two British children who leaves country for over 90 days in whatever period Reform are using to look after sick relative, and is not allowed back in. 4. Hong Kong BNO visa holder, likely to be arrested by Chinese on return, but does not have a job meeting salary threshold

Some very obvious cases that Farage and Yusuf need to be hammered on: 1. 78 year old pensioner on ILR for last 30 years who obviously cannot get work visa 2. 35 year old born in UK to non-nationals, never got UK citizenship because of cost, loses job and has to move to country they've never lived in

The ITV exposé on COVID now turns its sights on testing. I was stunned in 2020 when Sir Paul Nurse - Director of the Francis Crick Institute - told me he’d written to the government to offer the services of the Crick (the biggest biomeolecular lab in the country) - and never got a reply…

Quite appallingly, the shadow Lord Chancellor and shadow Secretary of State for Justice has posted to X an inaccurate and misleading statement about the Court of Appeal’s judgment, mistakenly quoting and describing paragraph 114 of the judgment it overruled, not the Court of Appeal’s own reasoning

Moving from "what's the most authoritative answer?" to "what's the most plausible answer?" turns out to have downsides.

Please help spread the word: Davidson College’s Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies is hiring a tenure-track assistant professor. The specialization is open, but we are hoping for candidates who add to, rather than replicate, existing strengths in teaching and research among our GSS faculty.

Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books www.404media.co/librarians-a...

A real, honest to goodness, entry-level, permanent, academic job in Economic History! #Economic #history #ecr #academic www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOT480/a...

Mad to me that universities are partnering with companies which have built their entire business model on theft, plagiarism, labour abuses and environmental destruction, and whose product will facilitate an entirely new round of plagiarism on the part of student users

How very surprising. What does it say when leaders celebrate the race to embrace these tools? Sharing link: on.ft.com/4nx47BM

Our next #RSVPDigiEv is about a month away! Join us Oct. 17 to hear about recent updates to the Curran Index from editors @emilyjlm.bsky.social+Lars Atkin in a talk, "From Periodicals to Dailies: Attribution Scholarship and the Joys and Challenges of Archival Plenitude." rs4vp.org/oct-digital-...

‘UK respondents dramatically overestimate how many immigrants there are and how many of them are Muslim. They overestimate what proportion of immigrants are from north Africa by a factor of 10, and from the Middle East by a factor of two, and underestimate how many are from North America.’

Very much enjoying the culture of trust and respect implicit in the installation of room usage monitoring devices on academics' office doors today. Imagine my shock on discovering that managers' doors remain unsullied…

Reform's contempt for the rule of law is very obvious

Starmer just announced £150 billion of investment into the UK, and ITV didn’t even mention it as one of their lead stories. Is it any wonder that Labour are polling so badly?

Times births column today

This isn't really the argument. No country anywhere has either a wholly unwritten or a wholly written constitution. The model the US has, which has proven worse, is a Presidential system. A Parliamentary system has proven better. /1

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

The willingness of members of the Conservative and Reform parties to risk the fragile peace by disregarding or misrepresenting the implications of their policies for Northern Ireland should disqualify them from ever holding public office.

Bear with me, I anticipate your disagreement. There is a clear pattern to the advice given to those who want to press back against rising racism. What it boils down to is that if you point out that racism is often being dressed up as “legitimate concerns” you will alienate people. /1

Stuart Hall Essay Prize. Please disseminate: www.stuarthallfoundation.org/foundation/s...

You can now fully search Exchequer depositions for the reign of Victoria [1837-1841] online. Plaintiffs, defendants, subject, county, dates of commission, the whole shebang. Enjoy! discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C...

I had a wonderful day yesterday at a gathering of the contributors to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Modern British History. Every paper was fascinating, and it was great to have a group thinking really creatively about what the big questions are when we look at the past 200 years or so.

In the 1895 General Election the newly formed Independent Labour Party contested a number of seats including Preston. The newly digitised ILP archive at the LSE (free access on-line) gives an idea of some of the issues, relevant now as then wp.me/p15p2Q-eK0

The BBC news headlines tonight led with the state of the king’s relationship with his son, followed by news of riots on the streets of Paris motivated by rising inequality and the failings of the political class. It’s possible that the eighteenth century is back.

We lost the vote 20-19 A vote for Matt Barnard (UK-wide HEC rep) and Adam Hansen (Northeast region HEC rep) will allow for a majority on HEC that votes for winnable strategic action If you want to stop HEC from voting for stupid things, please make sure you VOTE in the NEC casual vacancy election

UCU will be balloting for strike action over pay - because clearly HEC have identified a large pot of money that providers who are currently laying off vast numbers of staff and closing courses could be using to sweeten the pay offer.

It takes publishing a book to make Nick Clegg a staunch defender of intellectual property

The impact of the first austerity policy in the 1800s: "From 1740s to 1810s in England, a strong improvement in mortality is evident, followed by 5 decades of stagnation. Only in the 1870s did life expectancy rise again; it continued to rise until 2010s, when a new austerity policy was unleashed"

Today marks the anniversary of the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act receiving royal assent in 1883. My new post for @histparl.bsky.social looks at the Act's impact on election expenditure and electoral corruption: historyofparliament.com/2025/08/25/1...

My first article is out! It examines the conjunction of fiscal policy and gender politics, highlighting the moment in 1920 when different income tax rates for the married and unmarried were first introduced into the British tax system 🧵 1/7 academic.oup.com/tcbh/article...

Job in British history 1500-1900! www.christs.cam.ac.uk/college-lect...

There is so much to discuss about potential costs and benefits- but this is essentially the one fact that is most disconcerting and the reason I can’t get behind it: “For all its capacities, generative AI regularly hallucinates content, references, sources, and quotations”

For #YorkshireDay here is another of our posts sharing our research on constituencies and electioneering. Elections in the Yorkshire port of Whitby, given a seat by the 1832 Reform Act, were influenced by the shipping and the railway interests: victoriancommons.wordpress.com/2021/06/09/t...