Today someone from Marketing put up a list of courses that deserve marketing. Obviously humanities subjects weren’t on it. Only courses that don’t need marketing will be marketed because the market decides. Everyone else in the room applauded.

Not pictured: free labour, free men.

We had been told we would get credits by the BBC…I’m really tired of major tv companies doing historical documentaries and only crediting the big names who they use on screen, rather than the rest of us they talk to (for no pay) in the planning stages. This isn’t the first time it’s happen to me.

Or should VCs and the academic members of their senior teams instead be required to lead and teach 1 undergraduate module per term/semester, including all module admin and marking? Non-academic members of SMTs could all annually take a module, completing all assessments. Serious counterproposal. 3/3

“We deliberately sold as much of our capacity to rich people as we could and forced you to rent it from them, as a way of permanently shrivelling and crippling the scope of democracy” - sounds bad, like people should be in jail. “People are on their phones too much” - way better, highly preferable

Non-Al Carns Labour candidates when someone fires the starting gun on a leadership contest:

And it just gets worse: it looks like there will be no modern language provision at all. No music, no languages. Can a silent university call itself a university at all? Help us resist! Please contribute to @uonucu.bsky.social hardship fund if you can: www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding...

Couldn't possibly comment on how this might relate to the future of joint-honours programmes like History & Philosophy at my own esteemed institution.

Henry’s book is terrific! A superb piece of writing about the history of the workplace that takes us from Caribbean plantations to Amazon warehouses

Just heard my copy of Sarah Pearsall's Freedom Round the Globe, which I pre-ordered last week, is now on its way. And so is the one I pre-ordered in August 2025...! 😬 www.panmacmillan.com/authors/sara...

Every single member of the History Department at Uni of Nottingham is at risk of redundancy. Every single one of us.

Personally I think Sir Keir should stay in office to finish the job he started while in the previous leader's shadow cabinet: burning the Labour Party to the ground.

this graduation speech moment is notable, and her amazed shock at having failed to read the room feels instructive. when you're inside the bubble, you think everybody else is. but everybody isn't.

h/t @heatherchirdon.bsky.social

Hell yeah! 🎉💚 "Fresh ambition for Stirchley" after all!

Was it perhaps a mistake to privatise and cut as much as possible, as a means of ensuring future governments would be helpless and incapable of improving anything or helping anyone? Well, I suggest your answer to that will depend upon how big and fancy your house is.

This looks really good

I’m still thinking about those beautiful maps, the villains, the almost revolutions/revolutionaries, about how the micro and macro shape people’s political beliefs, and about writing biographies without heroes 😍— thanks @tomcutterham.bsky.social @johnmunro.bsky.social

Beautiful evening for one final round of @brumgreens.bsky.social deliveries... 💚

Thanks @zoethomas.bsky.social and @johnmunro.bsky.social for organising today's sneak-preview event for Empire Ablaze, out July 21st. I'm really appreciating right now how much colleagues have been rooting for the project from the start. 😄

Higher education in the UK just got much lower. How much lower will it sink before your MP notices and speaks out?

Map of All Countries That Have Ever Gained Independence From The United Kingdom "Independence from Britain is celebrated somewhere in the world, on average, one in every seven days." Full list: brilliantmaps.com/gained-in...

"If you take at face value what the AI executives themselves have been saying for the last decade, that an AI powerful enough to make humans go extinct is nascent, then acting with force to stop it would be a rational action." www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/why-the-ai...

This weekend I gave a presentation to a group of mostly college-aged folks and had a little line at the beginning of my slides that described it as an "AI-free presentation made by a human, for humans" and I had to pause for clapping at that part you love to see it

Midlands historians have a hard time sometimes convincing people that slavery ran just as deeply through our economy as through Colston's Bristol, say. But here we are: inherited wealth from enslavement in the family history leading to urban change.

"When the university was run democratically by the staff, it was supremely successful at soliciting donations... [then] the council of lay, external, non-executive trustees changed the royal charter twice, to disempower the academics and to empower themselves." www.theguardian.com/education/20...

was just saying this. it doesn’t matter that I’m doing well right now. my field is gutted and my job could disappear next year, next month, etc. and theres a bunch of guys with money going “all according to our plan to make thinking work obsolete”. the mood is grim!

Open-ended teaching-and-research history jobs in a great department? In this economy?! Way to go Warwick!

Indexing... 👀

Not really a podcast guy but I always enjoy Drafting the Past. Andrew Edwards and Rick Bell were both on great episodes recently with their American Revolution books. (Seriously, you should tune in for Rick's voice alone!) draftingthepast.com

What happened to Mayar Yahia Square? Read John's thread on the shady tactics and ongoing grip of British and Birmingham car culture.

The UK betrays the promise of a university: that students will be mentored in scholarship by people who are actively engaged in it. Unlike a secondary school, in a university the frontier between what is known and what is not is moving, and students can see that movement and participate in it.

Listings for *Empire Ablaze* now include some very kind comments from brilliant fellow historians. www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...

How to park (Porsche drivers' edition).

The 1780s, truly the awkward unwanted stepchild of the American Revolution! (And of course, the most interesting bit...)

I gave a talk about the English Revolution, the Atlantic World, and the midlands-born Puritan, Edward Winslow. Normal eighteenth-century service will resume shortly! buttondown.com/cutterham/ar...

Here's a question in my university's AI-in-teaching survey which is going to force everyone who doesn't use it in their classrooms to say they have no more than a "basic" understanding of it. What's the betting the analysis will conclude, "people who don't like AI also don't understand it?"

What do presidential rankings measure? Overall "Great Man" fame, expansion of the office, and success in war and imperialism. What if we reoriented US history around its greatest legislative accomplishments that did the most for the nation's people? Presidents should serve those legislative goals.

"Historians often act as if they’re simply providing background for other people... to make normative arguments. But I think it’s OK for historians to sometimes be more vigorous in making arguments themselves about how to think." www.thenation.com/article/cult...

One week until our exciting event with Eliga Gould! Please do come along if you’re on campus!

A **new** and **permanent** job in US Politics at the RAI. An exciting opportunity to help design and launch a new one year Master’s program in US politics, and join our intellectually vibrant (and fun) multidisciplinary dept dedicated to the study of the US and its place in the wider world.

The danger to my job from AI isn't that AI can do my job, it's that my job is made even more precarious by the way AI is shaping ideas of the value of work. It can't do my job, but it can be part of convincing people (incorrectly) that my job isn't necessary.

The Dispatch is hiring a staff writer! We're looking for a third writer to join Kate and Madeleine at our HQ in the Jewellery Quarter. If you love high quality writing and value local news with no ads or clickbait, consider applying. Click for more:

This is antiwar infrastructure.

Students without A‑levels are more likely to be working‑class, care‑experienced, disabled, mature and racially minoritised, often via BTECs, access courses and foundation years. Restricting loans by qualification route would hard‑wire existing inequalities into who gets to go to university.

Thank you to Verso for letting me write a 50,000 word little book about the American Revolution. It's like an antidote to those Dad-history-book doorstops! www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...

The work your unique mind does while reading sources is the whole point of reading sources--primary and secondary alike.

In October 1972, almost exactly a year before the start of the 1973 Oil Crisis, former Secretary of the Interior, Stewart L. Udall, wrote an essay for 'The Atlantic' (@theatlantic.com) titled, "The Last Traffic Jam" that 54 years later speaks directly to our current moment. A 🧵:

Spotted this nice combo of stickers after I voted just now, which pretty much capture where I’m at. Vote Love and Anti-Reform. When Labour offers nothing but more hatred and division, it has to be Hannah Spencer and the Greens this time.

I can still fix it.