A thread of #PublicDomain books I've got Google Books to make fully and freely available this year. Published by HMSO A Brief Guide to Official Publications London, HMSO, 1960. books.google.co.uk/books?id=q20...

Anybody able to help get me access to this?

What better way to start your year than a mining quiz question: chartle.cc

02. ZAMBIA The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell Serpell’s debut novel follows three families for three generations and more than 100 years of their lives in Zambia. #ReadTheWorld

#OtD 31 Dec 1912 about 160 African workers at the Wankie coal mine in colonial Rhodesia came out on strike. Workers were protesting the poor conditions after dozens had contracted scurvy, resulting in nine deaths over the previous three months stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/1143...

There are good resources for teaching/learning about Britain's long history of emigration in the archived materials from @migrationmuseum.org 's Departures exhibition. www.migrationmuseum.org/exhibition/d...

As an ex-young person who left Britain years ago, I'm always interested to see why people do the same. It's curious to see this described as something new that needs explanation. Britain is historically a country of a mass emigration, which has been forgotten. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A neat little nugget of medieval coal history as we come to the end of a year where the UK has just finished it first 15 months freed from coal power, but the US has slid backward on so many energy fronts. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1... #Speculations #MedievalSky

I always tell students if you ask a good question the article will write itself

Another good (open access) piece from London Review of International Law —- on nodules, frontiers, and Rosa. 🌊⛏️ academic.oup.com/lril/advance...

Guns, Germs, and Steel in Africa: Jared Diamond and the Limits of Geographic Determinism www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/guns-germs...

Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, has been caught using fake AI-generated citations in their textbooks

Graphite design is my passion

My only and best higher ed idea is that Britain needs to find a way to offer university courses to retirees

A very early mineral railway - part of the Liskeard and Caradon line. I think this section dates to 1846. Original stone block sleepers are from the nearby Cheesewring quarry. They were cheaper than wood but sometimes sank into the ground after heavy rain, which buckled the tracks.

The Mineworkers' Union of Zambia produces its own brand of eggs.

An archivist in Australia let me look at material I didn't have permission to view because she recognised my accent and we got chatting and worked out that she had been at school with the daughter of my old neighbour in the UK.

Turned up at the National Archives in Algiers in three quarter length shorts because it was too hot for this poor pasty Irish man and I couldn't enter due to the dress code so a soldier that was posted there lent me a pair of his jeans so I could go in. Classic Algerian generosity!

As the cataloguing of the NUM archives nears its end, our Project Archivist writes on the Miners' Hall, Barnsley: The completed Yorkshire Miners' Association archive catalogue is at mrc-describe.epexio.com/records/YMA NUM catalogue (work so far completed!) at mrc-describe.epexio.com/records/NUM

In our continuing series on places in labour history, Liz Wood introduces the headquarters building of the South Yorkshire Miners’ Association and its continuing importance now the coal industry has gone sslh.org.uk/2025/12/22/m...

Great line. The “I've been to many countries but never left Lviv” of resource rent extraction. It is theoretically possible Sonangol could add an IPO to this list in 2026 (or 2027, or 2028...)

Incredible quote on continuity in Angola’s oil industry during 40 years of war and upheaval from an executive of the state oil company: “You see, through colonialism, foreign invasion, Marxist-Leninism and capitalism, I have not left the same building.”

This map shows the projection of changes in annual precipitation in South Africa at ~1.5°C of heating. This is already playing out in real-time in December 2025. Floods in KZN (iol.co.za/news/south...) Drought in the WC (peterdutoit.com/knys...)

📢📢New article! How did apartheid South Africa weather the 1973–74 oil crisis? Despite sanctions, no oil reserves, and global recession, the immediate impact was limited. This article explores why, and how the crisis was turned into political capital. l1nq.com/sv0oJ

I want JStor unwrapped… This year you started 36 articles and finished 2.

Fascinated to learn that one of Britain's most notorious post-war criminals fought in the Mau Mau campaign and the Malaya Emergency and later claimed that this is where he learned to kill.

Looking at this map, I suspect - but can't prove - that this has something to do with coal mining.

Zambia Congress of Trade Unions has official letters of thanks displayed at its office from the Chinese University of Labour Relations and the Air War College of the United States Air Force. A nice summary of Zambia's eclectic international relations.

Good Reuters deep dive on the Simandou mega iron ore mine in Guinea. The IMF "found it could boost the country's real GDP by 26% by 2030, but it also said the reduction in poverty could be... just 0.6 percentage points without active policies to manage the transition."

sometimes i create notes with zero context which baffle me when i find them years later. this was created in 2021—wtf was i thinking about?

In Britain, this list is supplemented by the D Day landings, one of the few things that happened during the 20th century.

Chinese migrant gold miners have been viewed as slaves for centuries but this is the first time I've seen a Chinese state institution warning about Chinese slavery: www.reuters.com/world/china/...

Amazing 😳 digital archaeology How AI’s annoying blandness “accidentally replicated the linguistic ghost of the British Empire”

Finishing the year on a high - I've signed a contract with Cambridge University Press for my book: Metal and Literary Production in Early Modern England: Labour, Value, Violence. Transforming my PhD into a book whilst on a series of lectureships wasn't easy, so I WILL be celebrating every milestone

The British Library have a searchable interim Archives & Manuscripts Catalogues up & running: searcharchives.bl.uk (posting for all the folks who, like me, had somehow managed to miss this important development)

Shortly after the World Bank's privatisation plan had left thousands of miners redundant, unemployed miners in Zambia had to listen to a World Bank speaker at their annual fundraiser!

That also means.... I got to pick my top 5 African reads of the year 👏🏾 Books from Goretti Kyomuhendo, @willthisbeaproblem.bsky.social, @wordsweaver.bsky.social, @hofrench.bsky.social, and Oyinkan Braithwaite are on the list!

It’s the end of the year, so @thecontinent.org’s Africans of the year edition for 2025 is here! 🎉 So many great Africans.

Here’s the lecture, with references: alanlester.co.uk/blog/antisla...

This is a really great article about Bor in Serbia, "a place where mining is everything". The mid-c20th boom, subsequent bust in the 90s and revival under Chinese ownership has clear parallels with Southern Africa: www.ft.com/content/7556...

I'm old enough to remember when a 'remote conference' meant it was taking place at the University of Venda's Thohoyandou campus.

It exists! Check out mimbres.org

Thanks to @sulaimanij.bsky.social for this invite to talk about Congo, mining & the global energy transition for @energyrevolution.bsky.social. Perhaps of interest to some. linktr.ee/energyrevolu...

I enjoyed working with Gemini to transcribe documents in our collection for publication on the Arts&Culture platform. I also did A LOT of proof-reading, but it was nice to be able to share transcripts with the public, who generally haven't spent years learning to tell an c18th F from a S or a TH!

This is a really excellent and under-utilised historical source. For whatever reason, the CIA has made a lot of digitised material available online.

For anyone interested in earthy, environmental and knowledge histories, I can recommend following the SCARCE project in Vienna: they put up and interesting colloquium series this semester.

If you think too often about the slaughter in Gaza, now a hellscape of rubble and severed limbs, you will go insane. I don't know when, but one day we will emerge from this time of monsters. For now: if human lives are disposable, what is there to protect you and your children?

Radio phone-ins this morning in Lusaka featured people complaining about blasting operations damaging their houses. Mining shapes so much of everyday life here.

Alongside the word of the year we should have “the word that has lost the most of its meaning this year”. I nominate “ceasefire”.

#CfP Call for Papers Organised by Global History and Culture Centre, University of Warwick: Between Thompson and the Global: Reflections on Labour History Today Workshop: 26-27 June 2026, University of Warwick Deadline for abstracts: 30 January 2026 Submit to [email protected]