Finally had a chance to listen to this while doing some pre-holiday food prep. It's delightful! Check out this great episode of @c19podcast.bsky.social by @ainenorris.bsky.social about one of the "Queens of Ghost-Land," a purported milk-bewitching woman named Sally (Sallie) Friddly.

We’re offering free vaccine clinics in Boston. Vaccines are safe, effective, and protect against serious illness. Getting vaccinated keeps you healthy and helps protect your family, friends, and community. Find upcoming vaccine clinics at boston.gov/vaccine-clinics.

Futures of the Southern Gothic (Dec 4, 11AM-1 PM CST) What is the Southern Gothic? Why is it so popular? What will Southern Gothic look like as we move deeper into the 21st century? What cultural work will it do for us? Link: lsu.zoom.us/j/3747973363... #GothicLiterature #SSAG #SouthernGothic

Mystified by how to approach an academic journal editor? Need help getting through the "revise and resubmit" doldrums? Our next #RSVPDigiEvent can help! Join us next Friday, Nov. 21 and hear from the editors of top #Victorian journals on "How to Get Published in a Academic Journal": buff.ly/ydJkKAK

Hey if you're into energy, environment, pipelines, Great Lakes, Indigenous rights, or just a habitable planet, checkout this webinar about how we can start to dismantle the infrastructure that sustains fossil capitalism. It's a great panel that happens to include me. @billmckibben.bsky.social

Sure there was a lot of news yesterday, but don't miss this story: "Gummy sharks lay scattered among the rubble" after a truck hit a wall & flipped at a notoriously terrible intersection in #Lowell. Photo w/ shark-strewn rubble was taken TWO DAYS after the accident. www.lowellsun.com/2025/11/12/n...

The children’s picture book, “Strega Nona, An OldTale,” celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Author and illustrator Tomie dePaola penned the book about the Italian “grandmother witch.” (via @mprnews.org)

ALA 2026 CFP from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers now posted! See CFP details at americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferen...

If you or anyone you know would be interested in a GREAT Victorian studies conference in the spring, here's the CFP. Proposals due Dec 6. Especially let anyone within driving distance of Cincinnati know! The lovely @nathankhensley.bsky.social will be keynote speaker. midwestvictorian.org/conference/

Thrilled that Kelly Wisecup and Christopher Pexa will present at the next meeting of the Am Lit & Culture seminar at the Mahindra Center at Harvard, Nov 12, 6pm. This event is co-sponsored with the Native Cultures of the Americas Seminar. Join us if you are in town!

Sharing a few of my favorite historical images of when women started ruining the workplace.

MA Emergency Mgmt map shows over 2500 people without power in Lowell but National Grid's map shows nothing and website reporting of outage doesn't seem to work. mema.mapsonline.net

Aaand the power is out! Just to add some extra spooky to the day. @nationalgrid.bsky.social Neighbor and I both tried to report outage on the web form but it doesn't seem to be working!

Happy Halloween! Free #costume ideas from archives! Why not be: 1. The witch from this beautiful edition of Gaskell's Lois the Witch (1861-ish) 2. Thomas Cooke as Frankenstein's creature (1832?) 3. "The Nemesis of Neglect" from a Punch cartoon (1888) 4. Group costume: Broom ladies (1850?)

Looking for something else but found this great stereograph @historicnewengland.bsky.social of the Making-up room, Lawrence Hosiery Co., #Lowell, Mass., ca. 1865. A lot of early images of the mills only feature machinery, so it's lovely to see the workers. www.historicnewengland.org/explore/coll...

The country’s largest food assistance program is set to lapse on Nov. 1 if the federal government shutdown continues. That will affect almost 1.1 million people in more than 655,000 households across Massachusetts.

Made another donation to the Merrimack Valley Food Bank mvfb.org/resources/ to support their work. I noticed that I haven't been hearing anything from the likes of Market Basket or Stop & Shop about the impact of SNAP cuts on their businesses. Would be nice if they'd stand up for their customers.

Just a taste of both the best and the worst thing: Harriot Curtis apparently had a lot to say and not enough paper. In letters like this one, written from Lowell on 12 May 1838, after filling the page, she turned it upside down and wrote a "second page" upside down between the lines of the first.

So excited to begin my day in an archive (Smith College Special Collections) where I've just paged the letters of former Lowell mill girl Harriot Curtis. My usual archive is closed due to the federal shutdown. This is a beautiful, sun-drenched reading room on a gorgeous western Mass October day.

This morning in WBUR Today: Lowell's own 'Citgo sign' will turn on tonight for the first time in nearly a decade Plus: — More than a million in Mass. at risk of losing SNAP benefits — Cambridge's 14-month path closure www.wbur.org/news/2025/10... @wbur.org

Enjoyed a nice little view of #Lowell last night. Back to digging around in the Lowell Offering today.

Honestly, watching Toogle destroy this orange orb is as much enrichment for me as for Toogle. I'm going to try to approach today's to-do list with this energy.

Hundreds turned out for the No Kings rally in Lowell. Speakers, music, and then a march downtown. A car full of young men drove by the rally multiple times to yell, “F&@% liberals,” among other things. Peaceful beyond that. Story from the events there and in Chelmsford later at lowellsun.com.

This is why we will peacefully come together on Saturday, October 18 for our #NoKings Rally, to show support for our friends, neighbors, Greater-Lowell community, and the country we so proudly love. www.lowellsun.com/2025/10/13/i...

Dealing with an unfortunate halt to progress. Because the Center for Lowell History is in a National Parks building, it is closed, so a chunk of my current research project is on hold. Their digital collections libguides.uml.edu/archives/dig... are great but not quite what I need right now.

10 October 1893 a Boston Daily Globe headline asked "Who is Waterproof Man?" who was haunting the young women of Exeter, NH, assaulting them, and tearing off pieces of their clothing. Factory girls and shop girls were terrified. Rumors claimed it was a prank by students at Phillips Exeter.

If you are a supporter and reader of @contingent-mag.bsky.social one of the biggest things you can do to help us at the moment is get this CFP to the NTT folks in your life. The fracturing of social media has made it very difficult to get the word out esp. to adjuncts and VAPs.

Some gravestone rubbings from the collection at the Center for #Lowell History. Augusta H. Locke (the rubbing omits the "E" at the end) and Susan E. Parker worked in Lowell's mills. Augusta's age is listed as "17 years, 4 months, 10 days," a specificity that surprised me. Each day is precious.

I encountered this thread from @midnightpals.bsky.social and thought it was hilarious -- just delightful to imagine a Hellman's garlic aioli-scented book. Then like 10 minutes later, I discovered from another post that this promotion is real and I don't even know what to say. Hellman, WTF?

Even mill girls enjoyed a cozy fall murder mystery. Fantastic short story "A Woman's Revenge" appeared 1 Oct 1842 in The Factory Girl newspaper. It tells the tale of an "unaccountable murder" in Williamstown, Vermont and ends with a written confession by the murderess: "I slew him!"

Exhausted and grieved to share that our perfect dog, Alice, passed away peacefully yesterday. She was surrounded by her loving but heartbroken family and she had a belly full of rotisserie chicken. You can see her in action, as we like to remember her: youtu.be/GC9fMdTUsng?...

It's a beautiful day at the #Lowell Kinetic Sculpture Race. Perfect weather and wonderful crowd plus the Party Band. My fave was Moo Haul: the Legend of Storrow. (Non-Boston area people look up "storrowing.")

Heads up @igagoths.bsky.social - delighted to announce the CFP for IGA 2026: 'Gothic Selves/Artificial Others' hosted at the University of Hull 28-31 July! hullgothic.wordpress.com

a reminder that you can still sign up for the settlement if they stole your work www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/contact

#OTD 5 Sept 1874 the Daily Southern Cross (Auckland NZ) informed readers of a "Novel Scalping" in which a 14-year old factory girl in Birmingham got her hair caught in a spindle and that "her head was completely scalped all round, the skin and hair being torn off as clean as a night-cap."

I am at home, safe. But I am listening to the police scanner while many of my UML colleagues and students are currently sheltering in place in their classrooms and offices due to reports of a man with a large gun on campus. www.nbcboston.com/news/local/u...

1910 US census indicates my great-grandmother Margaret Agnes Valentine worked as a lacer in a cotton mill at age 15. She lived to age 99 and I knew & loved her, but never knew anything about this until right now. It's an unnerving discovery after all these years of researching mill girls.

Delighted to have this arrive today in the mail today: The Edinburgh Companion to the Victorian Ghost Story, edited by Andy Smith, including an essay from me about "Ghostly Machines and Mechanical Ghosts." Full TOC and ordering info: edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-vic...

teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com

In today's revisions, I have cut 14 semi-colons from this essay (at the request of the editor); I am in mourning. Not so much killing your darlings as maiming them?

Just successfully accomplished this and feel the slightest bit better about things. www.engadget.com/big-tech/how...

This article reminded me of this item from 1856 www.loc.gov/resource/rbp... showing the grades of each student at #Lowell High School. Boys' scores for "deportment" range from 1 to 7 (1 being the highest/most positive), while girls' scores are almost always "1" with just two 2's and one 3.

#OTD 14 July 1906, Wales' Weekly Mail published "Ghost in a Factory," an account of a ghostly figure walking through the factory a night, "everything natural in appearance except the head, which looked as if it had been crushed or mutilated, only a stump remaining..." On-theme for Bastille Day?

Today is the first day of Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies ‘Gothic Crossroads’ conference! Unable to attend in person (or perhaps don't quite have the luggage space)? Explore our virtual stand via the link below ⤵️ www.uwp.co.uk/gothic-and-h...

BLOG: 'My interest in the gothic lies primarily with women as Other; with how female protagonists and women authors create, embody and/or expose ‘monstrosity’.' Megan DeVirgilis introduces The Female Vampire in Hispanic Literature on our blog: ➡️ www.uwp.co.uk/the-female-v...

I'm also co-chairing a roundtable panel on Teaching the American Gothic. We're 16G, Saturday 10-11:20, also in Empire room. This panel (full details in screenshot and alt-text) is one of two organized by the Society for the Study of American Gothic @ssag.bsky.social We'd love to have you join us!

Putting together some slides for my 8:30 am (yikes!) panel at ALA next Saturday morning in Boston. I'll be talking about Harriet Jane Farley (and her Lowell Offering) and George Rex Graham (and his Graham's Magazine). We're session 15E (Empire room).

I'll be at the American Literature Association conference in Boston next weekend. I'm presenting a paper about The Offering on one panel & co-chairing another panel on Teaching the American Gothic, both on Saturday the 24th. americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferen... Let's meet up!

Not quite sure why #smoke is such a big deal today. I've seen a lot of it in my research, so here are a few favorite images: Bethlehem Steel Works (1881), view of a British industrial town (1850-70-ish), Lowell, Vermont (1910-20-ish), Lowell, Massachusetts (1910) (probably my very favorite).

As an elder millennial, I could trade my lifetime of tax contributions to the NEH for one month of Netflix and have just enough left over to get some avocado toast if I split it with two other people