1/6 Some belated comments on 2024-5's YouGov survey of the British public's attitude to the British Empire: yougov.co.uk/society/arti...

So the next salvo is from ex-Labor politicians. Huge groundswell. 22 of them! Some overlap with the previous eminent sporting greats. Basically if you can muster a quorum you’ve got front page coverage guaranteed. Get in line! A clear majority (of a small vocal minority) want this.

Attention historians: Reviewer opportunity below! #history #review #bookshelves #oralhistory #academic

"The government should always stand ready to support the illegal occupation of Ukraine by the USSR, by the Soviet Union..." —Sussan Ley, Leader of the Liberal Party, 2026 (not 1986). #auspol #BackintheUSSR #SovietUnion #USSR #Rumpelstiltskin #FreudianSlip #LNP

I suppose we will now see Trump using Muduro show trials to dazzle the US public, hoping they do not notice Trump’s own looting behaviour.

Chris Minns wondering if anyone will think it is too early to ban protests against the US

Article I, Section 8 "The Congress shall have power... To declare war" and United Nations Charter, Article 2(4) "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State"

Posstradamus! 🤣🤣 Nah - I'm just old enough to have seen it all before in a life lived in politics.

“More than half the gas exported from Australia is given away for free. What little revenue is collected is dwarfed by HECS repayments – but no one expects to see the head of the student union barging into the prime minister’s office to demand a better deal.” satpa.pe/nLPNEKN

The Feds don't want to run a Royal Commission into anti-semitism and Bondi, because they don't want buckets of shit poured on intelligence services failure, and they don't want public findings of particular Israeli government actions driving hostility to Jewish people both domestic and abroad.

My rest of life resolution- that I will be able to follow David Attenborough’s (and JGA Pocock’s) example and keep producing works until the end.

Woke up this morning with an urge to write a blog post answering the awesome questions historians have asked me about digital humanities, especially AI, in 2025. If you want to add a question to my list, it can be anon., please DM.

What is it with Taylor and Francis producing e-books with no bloody page numbers? The database is next to useless for citations.

The passages in Herodotus that use the term Palaistinê are few but consequential. They provide one of the earliest extant Greek testimonies to a geographical designation that would have an extraordinary afterlife in classical & later political vocabularies blakandblack.com/2025/12/31/i...

Interesting survey on how the Australian public feels about history. I suspect that in the UK too, there are contradictory desires for a story of national pride and also for truths about colonialism. compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Guy Rundel’s comments on Bondi massacre, motives and the increasingly silly response to it by Gov is worth a read open.substack.com/pub/guyrundl...

In summary, this theory does discredit to both men. It claims FitzRoy was so unstable that he needed an emotional-support Darwin, and that Darwin was invited aboard as a helpmeet rather than due to his scientific ability. This is entirely inaccurate and based on suppositon instead of evidence. END

Really interesting research showing that while ultra-specialization in a single discipline might lead to better results early in one’s career, multi-discipline training and practice pays off big time in the long run. This applies to a range of professions from scientists to athletes and more

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

This is a classic misconception among people who do not engage with historical sources. I constantly encounter similar statements in relation to racism. Just because there were many powerful people who thought and behaved racist and shaped politics, does not mean that there were no opposing views.

Another example of why skull morphology is problematic for repatriation purposes.

It's probably also worth pointing out here that additional rights and protections are both hard and easy to achieve in Australia. Easy if it's a "protect all, you protect any given one" universal thing, but very difficult if it's a 'protect just this one and not the all' type of thing.

Maybe Frydenberg should start yelling at this bloke who in 2016 wanted 18c watered down against the wishes of Jewish leaders theconversation.com/ministers-se...

The long legacies of the British Empire. Probably explains why ChatGPT is so good at transcribing C18th and C19th colonial writing.

Quakers Australia join our voice to the many expressing our shock, condemnation and deepest grief at the mass shooting of Jewish people at a Hanukkah gathering in Sydney, a terrible act of antisemitic violence...

My opinion on John Howard is that he destroyed the nation's future.

Ideologies come and go and fanatics conduct horrendous acts. But in this skit Rowland Atkinson, explains in very simple terms, why guns should not be in the community youtu.be/k7ThhuIUll8

Whether you kill 15 innocent people because you hate all Jews or you kill 70,000 because you hate all Palestinians, your betrayal of humanity is the same. Unreasoning hatred breeds unreasoning hatred. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

"Bondi terror shooting should spark new gun reform measures" "No city dweller needs six firearms and this is where old-fashioned Australian commonsense needs to kick in." www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/bondi...

Non-creatives think ideas are rare and precious. But most creatives already have far more ideas than they can use in a lifetime. The real bottlenecks are time and technical skill.

I’m used to reading conservative outrage about revealing the scale of traumatic events 100+ years ago, but over the next 5 to 10 years we we’ll see denialism about the events of the last 18 months: open.substack.com/pub/libertyl...

Hegseth's second strike on an alleged drug boat to kill survivors was murder. But does that mean blowing up the other alleged boats with first strikes was OK? Why not just stop them on the high seas and search them? Remember, the US declared war on the UK in 1812 for that sort of thing.

1/2 Historians of slavery & Empire have known all along that Lord Biggar’s & History Reclaimed’s interventions in these fields are wholly politically motivated, morally & logically inconsistent and founded on the cherry-picking rather than examination of evidence. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Historians, I've got a curiosity itch. Help me out by completing this poll. When I say paradata you say: 1. What's that? 2. Oh, our "new" methodology 3. We don't need new concepts. 4. AI demands such concepts. Gimme. #skytorians #history #professional #academic

Defending Country’s review of my recent article with coauthors Paul Turnbull, Cressida Fforde and Jocelyn Bardot www.defendingcountry.au/news/there-i...

If you're not German, you may have missed this: 1934: Nazi "archaeologists" prepping for a rally find a skeleton, declare it to be the uber-male ur-arian; 2019: Archaeologists revisit finds; evidence implies she was a powerful female shaman of color. 🙃😊😂 www.deutschlandfunk.de/schamanin-ba...

The government has said that the remains of five Ainu people will be returned from the Natural History Museum in Britain to Japan.

This is nauseating. As reported, about as clear cut a war crime as it's possible to imagine.

Oysters and confiscated aboriginal weapons.

Will this revolution in reading C18th and C19th manuscripts result in an increased interest in those areas of study?

I have had a similar experience with ChatGPT for transcriptions. The ideas for classroom use are also interesting newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

“The former ANU vice-chancellor’s golden handshake means that her new annual salary will be more than the total annualised savings ANU sought from the proposal to disestablish the ANU School of Music.” www.canberratimes.com.au/story/911946...

First revealed in spy photos, a #BronzeAge #city emerges from the steppe An unexpectedly large city lies in a sea of grass inhabited largely by nomads. arstechnica.com/science/2025... #archaeology #Kazakhstan

I shopped for suits many years in advance, and none of them fit me anymore.

In 1950 the Melbourne Argus asked 10 people if they knew the significance of Australia Day. Nobody could really answer them. The two correct answers were not even sure if they were correct. trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/ar...

The truth about Cricket. Or is it an exercise in hydration control?

Check out the recent article 'Disarming the Resistance: Police Collecting of Indigenous Australian Cultural Property for Museums' by Gareth Knapman, Paul Turnbull, Cressida Fforde & Jocelyn S. Bardot: doi.org/10.1080/0308...

Speaking at Hiroshima University tonight NYC time via zoom at about history about the present. Thanks to @dahlia-cs.bsky.social for the invitation. nerps.org/2025/10/14/n...