Ghoulish behaviour. Just when you think they can’t shock you any more than they already have

My favourite archives ( @archivesnattravail.bsky.social ) posted my favourite April Fools today

"... a big bad Royal Navy..."

Universities: you must complete a risk assessment and ethical review for this perfectly safe activity. Also universities: please embrace this energy-hungry water-guzzling plagiarism machine that is frequently wrong. Also, it makes you thick and may encourage you to kill yourself.

Allegations of “family voting” was *the* top story on the BBC news summary the morning after the by-election. It was specifically alleged or implied by spokespeople from every major political party. It was directly reported by the political editor of Sky and the political editor is the Spectator.

🎨 ARTISTS in RESIDENCY. We are pleased to welcome Nina Vroemen and Hervé Demers to the DePOT project, whose work will be featured at this year’s DePOT conference in Montréal, Canada. Welcome and congratulations! Read their biography and project description:

I'm looking forward to speaking to French history students in Birmingham later this week (guest video appearance on Simon Jackson's 'Equality, Environment and Empire in Modern France' course) If anyone would like me to speak about the book, then drop me a line, I'm happy to help! 🗃️ #skystorians

and how many times have we heard that there is 'parity of esteem' between T&R and teaching-only roles?

Sad loss for French urban history

It’s not just about quantity of rental homes: it’s about quality. 1 in 5 privately rented homes fail to meet the “Decent Homes Standard” Unless forces private landlords to meet this standard sooner than its pencilled in date of 2035, people will paying more and more for poorer quality homes.

Our housing market is in crisis. Renters are being ripped off. We need rent controls and a massive housebuilding programme to bring back social housing. Will the government act? news.sky.com/story/rents-...

Excellent stuff that loosely reminds me of how much time architectural historians have to spend telling other people that they aren't only interested in the history of architects or "styles"

Come join me this Thursday in Manchester (UK)

Can the common people be enlightened? How should cultural elites and political leaders embark on the task? A new article on the 18thC debate, re-assessing Gadamer's claim that the Enlightenment harboured a “prejudice against all prejudices.” doi.org/10.1017/S147...

So, um... this is bad. Really bad. I looked at the letters that were translated by the AI, and the very first one I found was almost entirely hallucination. Thread:

Happy to see this Special Issue out in the world - Cultural Histories of Medicine & Health in the Long 19th Century - edited by Larry Duffy & myself @uksdn.bsky.social Great contributions from Jacob Meister, Kaat Wils, Sun-Young Park, Kathryn Bryan & Aine Larkin with several chapters open access!

Absolutely soul destroying. First 2 essays on my 'to mark' pile are clearly AI generated. One student has ticked 4 out of 6 boxes on their AI declaration sheet, stating it's been used to suggest sources, summarise them, create a draft, and improve writing. WHAT. THE. FUCK. ARE. YOU. LEARNING. AHH!

Housing crisis a disaster, most political parties on side of landlords representing landlord interests.

I have an Eighteenth Brumaire joke. It wasn’t funny the first time I told it, but it will be this time

10/ When you recognise that crisis is rooted in capitalist modes of production, technology choices and structural inequality, the targets are institutions, not bodies. The remedies are regulation, redistribution, democratic control of production, not coercion.

Unusual request but any help would be appreciated. I'm most of the way through reserching/writing an article on British anti-Romani legislation & persecution up to 1824 Any ideas of a journal where I could it would be peer reviewed but published open access for free? 1/2

The person in my seminar room before me is either teaching theology OR simplifying fractions. If the latter, what does 1/ryowoman mean?

Without naming your job, tell me something you say over and over again at your work. Check the MHRA style guide, chapter 7

The whole "AI" industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent back cognitive support systems. Forever. It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation infrastructures but your brain.

Where was this post when I was giving my lecture on C19 social surveys last week

100% this. "The number of ways in which firms like yours disrespect writers and other creative people are endless. And you require us — the people harmed — to put brakes on the harmful things YOU are doing, not just to us but to entire creative professions." >>

'A very nice chap, but ... a perfectionist' replaced by 'an appalling mediaeval baron of an architect, a man of zero architectural quality, a primeval creature'. How Birmingham sacrificed housing quality for quantity in its 1960s high-rise boom ... municipaldreams.substack.com/p/post-war-h...

I’m one of the thousands of authors who have published this empty book, in protest at AI companies stealing our copyrighted work www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Four images of 10 years of transformation in Paris: 2016–2026. @annehidalgo.bsky.social will no longer be mayor in March 2026, but this vision of a Paris for life must live on. Cities are places of solidarity, kindness and well-being in an increasingly authoritarian and brutal world. We need it!

This disaster finally settled the much-debated question of whether coal dust could cause underground explosions. Many French mining engineers had hitherto argued that explosions were only caused by gases known in English as firedamp, but there was no gas underground at Courrières.

Glad to see this accurately show Mulhouse: independent city republic in the middle of French Alsace until its governing elite voted to “reunite” with France in 1798

Opinion: “What I think about is if I return to Afghanistan, will I have the chance to continue my teaching at university? There, I see zero per cent job security.” The UK’s visa ban is another blow for Afghanistan’s despairing intellectuals, says scholar #highered https://ow.ly/Po5r50YraxQ

Guess who's teaching discourse analysis this week 🤗

Striking statistics on the importance of the University of Manchester @manchestermill.bsky.social MCC has long recognised this (as did NWDA with Martin Harris on its Board) although initially more as a tool of physical regeneration (eg via the merger with UMIST)…

The House of Lords Digital & Communications Committee just published their report on AI, copyright & the creative industries, and their conclusions could not be clearer. 🧵 1/5

Anyone know of any pots of money for ECRs paying for image permissions?? Sorting it all out and things are adding up..

Lectures 9 & 10 of the semester today and tomorrow, but at least I'm on home turf research-wise as they're on Poverty and Welfare c. 1800-1913. It also means that I get to roll out this fun role-play exercise on social surveys in the seminars which worked really well last year

Stealing this for the first slide of some of my three hour MA classes on capitalism

Exciting day as I received some early draft versions of the book cover from @manchesterup.bsky.social Starting to believe this is actually coming out! Also, @lrbobrien.bsky.social you’ll be happy that I’ve kept the tradition up of using a Daumier print

Have to cut c. 300 words from an article draft. 'Command+F "Indeed,"' Have to cut c. 100 words from an article draft.

Any authors or image creators who haven't registered their latest work with ALCS need to do so asap. The next payment is being processed and you really don't want to miss out.

New curated collection of @sfhs.bsky.social French Historical Studies, by Avner Ben-Amos, on articles showing the influence of Pierre Nora on French history, commissioned by @jenniferheuer.bsky.social & Christine Haynes. 🗃️ All in open access! read.dukeupress.edu/french-histo...

So happy to wake up and see the news. Hope that Labour’s loss means a radical shift in leafleting policy, because this was gross to see on the doormat yesterday

It was the lived of times, it was the laughed of times

“the actual number of staff leaving their posts is likely to be higher because most institutions did not include in their figures staff who completed fixed-term or temporary contracts.”

9,600 redundancies at just 24 universities. Imagine what the picture is for the sector as a whole. This is the other half of the student loan scandal picture, which has been national news lately. Nothing at all from the government on a key sector effectively in freefall…

Last academic year, commuting from Oxford to Manchester, I had *one* train cancellation (when a storm basically cancelled all UK trains). In the four weeks of this semester alone, I’ve had three and it’s grim

OTD in 1834, six farm workers from Tolpuddle were arrested for forming a union. The story became a founding myth of the labour movement, but it often ignores the radical world in which they lived. In this article from the archive, Tom Scriven revisits the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Just curious: is there a book in your field that absolutely blew you away? That changed the way you thought about and approached your subject?