"What was once a worrying trend across a small number of disciplines is now an emergency, threatening all subjects. Courses are closing, provision is contracting, and geographical inequalities in access are becoming entrenched. Important skills and capabilities ... are being lost." #Skystorians

Lovely story, and thankfully devoid of the clichés and errors that are often present when finds in archives are reported.

This must be remembered: ALL Labour’s transphobic measures, from harming/killing children by withdrawing healthcare & introducing state-sponsored conversion therapy to an attempted national toilet ban worse than anything from Trump/MAGA were imposed without a single vote in parliament.

These stories are piling up of "popular" writers "discovering" history that is "untold", but not mentioning that they found the history in a published historical monograph and/ or unpublished dissertation. It's beyond using "untold" loosely. It's dishonest.

No apologies for reposting this which has already been reposted so many times. I love it. Let’s teach children and teens about kindness, difference and inclusion

Need Heterodox Academy to explain how the right wing in a one party state restricting non-disruptive speech is the fault of the left.

Indeed! They have so much rum crap there - eg British tank mugs that appear as you put hot water in, which seemed grim given a tank bursting into flames, probably incinerating everyone inside, was known as “brewing up”. And the focus is so skewed to Nazi armour it’s unreal

It keeps getting worse. When historians say that they pieced together a story from the archives, that is not insignificant. It is the work we do. To dismiss Cleves as they have done, D&Q erase her labor and profit from it.

Yep! I wrote about it in Men At War in the chapter on boys and the appeal of violence / war toys. Also discussed it on the War Tat episode of the Cursed Objects podcast - of all the grotesque merch I encountered researching the book, that is by far the worst www.cursedobjects.co.uk/episodes/war...

I have no idea how the Tank Museum came to have such a reputation!

I ought to also retract my claim that the Tank Museum is shamelessly pandering to Nazis - because on this basis apparently they *are* a bit ashamed of it...

Lisa Nandy currently engaged in the greatest last-minute attempt to feign interest in culture since I tried to read the second half of Sons And Lovers the night before my English A-Level.

Pretty big move for the Culture Secretary to leave X, saying her department will too.

A 96% accurate sex phrenologist would still get the "sex" of three hundred thousand British residents wrong.

My response to D&Q's statement:

Only when big names shout out do the media pick up the story. The story is not Exeter or their supporters it is about the dismantling of humanities: www.theguardian.com/education/20...

In this thread: a lot of people who are scared of ebikes yet very relaxed about cars - kind of making my point for me #motonormativity

We limit the speed of ebikes "for public safety", yet this study shows we'd need to limit SUVs to 5.7 km/h for them to pose the same risk to other people #motonormativity findingspress.org/article/1587...

My book baby has arrived! 🤩 Not for the first time, my wonderful editors @yalebooks.bsky.social have delightfully surprised me: the colours on the jacket catch the light (I'm told it's called 'spot gloss')! It really is a thing of beauty. #books #booksky #histsci #queerhistory 🌈📚🗃️

Next at a Home Offive near you: Asylum seekers should hop on leg while singing God Save the King in reverse when in the presence of a True Brit(TM)...

110 years ago today whistles blew in the early morning within British and French trenches to signal the beginning of one of the pivotal moments of the First World War: the infantry assault at the beginning of the Battle of the Somme.

I am very glad to see how widely covered the insanity at Exeter is, but please I beg everyone, understand this is happening EVERYWHERE in UK universities. If people care about anything valuable that this sector does or contributes too, they need to get loud, now.

An MP gets it! I am so relieved to see an MP Getting It! Not isolated, nor solely education (however devastating that is!), but research infrastructure that's being set on fire for the entire country.

Once again, this is actually happening in dozens of less-posh universities too.

Genuinely ecstatic we have this chapter in Writing Game Histories. An amazing range of perspectives from people who care about what games do to history & vice versa. And at the core of it, a clear sense of why thinking thoughtfully & creatively about history, play (and research!!) matters so much

Ben Cullen, a leading figure of the "Raise the Colours" campaign, will stand trial for three separate charges regarding a total of 78 indecent images of children. I have only seen this covered in local newspapers, so far. Grim as it is, it needs wider coverage www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/2624087...

This petition needs as many signatories as the Exeter one. Please sign and share — don’t let Hertfordshire managers get away with this just because a Russell Group one took the spotlight. #UKHE

My Daily Routine with Shabana Mahmood 7am: wake up 7.15: breakfast 7.40: shower 7.55: Think of some vile, malicious, dehumanising thing to do to make suffering people's lives worse, release statement to that effect 8am: brush teeth

Inspired by Richard Moore-Colyer's defence of Rolf Gardiner, which I think is bested only by the time Daniel Farson wrote a whole book defending Henry Williamson and STILL included a bit where he smashed a kitten to death on his floor.

And if you are thinking, how does a collaboration between a historian & a musician work? Listen to an answer via the link below. It's a song inspired by the will of London widow Alice Walter, who died during the dreadful 1665 plague. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXwB...

We support @livingstreets.bsky.social #PavementOverload campaign to get delivery robots off our pavements. Pavements are already inaccessible for many #Disabled people, and these robots will make them less safe and more inaccessible. #TakingTheDis

ICYMI! My new essay on fire-taming, uncovering the secret world of French healers, in @aeon.co. Words on fire, inflammation, humoral medicine, Celtic culture, Bachelard, Intangible Cultural Heritage, Sontag and the tiny gestures of care. All thanks to editor @marinabenjamin.bsky.social.

This especially hurts to read in a world where people are still pushing the “historians will say they’re roommates” narrative. Total erasure of very, very hard work.

I’ve loved Walden’s previous work but this is unacceptable. It’s plagiarism, veering into fraud. Just because historians tell stories about real things that happened doesn’t mean you get to take those stories with essentially no credit to the person who did the hard work of piecing them together.

There's a revealing Seven Dials side to this story. In the late-1940s the Ministry of Works initially proposed the Shaftesbury Hotel on Mercer Street as the British Council’s new residential centre for colonial students arriving in London. 1/2

Yes, we need more “I googled it and asked ChatGPT so now I’m an expert”.

I visited London's newest museum - the Museum Of Youth Culture in Camden - to look at their model of "an alternative history of London" for The Times. www.thetimes.com/uk/london/ar...

I wrote a snarky blogpost about this some years ago, about an actual historian within my own field (naming no names) who did this sort of thing lesleyahall.blogspot.com/2014/02/cred... (the general view of those who knew the topic re the book was what was good was not new, and what new, not good...)

Im so exhausted by this pattern. Historians spend years in the archives to write detailed accounts of the past. Only for journalists, doctors, podcasters, and now cartoonists, to swoop in and get paid a lot of money to trot out the same work, "uncovering hidden histories" that are not at all hidden.

It’s disappointing to see an artist misrepresenting an adaptation as an original work. Adaptations are great! They bring stories to new audiences and build on source material in valuable ways. But without proper credit and compensation, it’s just stealing.

Years of painstaking research and writing co-opted by another. @rachelcleves.bsky.social and her extraordinary book deserve much better. Please read and repost. Let's extend the visibility of and endorse the many-faceted impact of her 2014 biography, "Charity and Sylvia."

And behind the accessible *quality* content now available you'll repeatedly find higher education: students who benefit and go on to create content, and academic researchers whose expertise and training make possible such content. It's rightly a dialogue, though one increasingly at risk #Skystorians

To me, this feels like another example of tech companies demanding access to public space to which they are not entitled, whether it's cluttering pavements with scattered bicycles or these delivery robots, which are arguably even more obnoxious.

buy this and make me a millionaire

There's a revealing Seven Dials side to this story. In the late-1940s the Ministry of Works initially proposed the Shaftesbury Hotel on Mercer Street as the British Council’s new residential centre for colonial students arriving in London. 1/2

Finally, a way to get recalcitrant boomers to care about climate change

I’m very pleased that the trade press is giving space to the Exeter horror. Next challenge is for them to look a little further down the league tables - Northumbria perhaps, or my own place. We have feelings too.