Did you take part in a mock election at your UK school or college between 1983 and 2001? Share your memories for a research project on young people and democracy in modern Britain! Write to us about your experiences here: forms.office.com/e/FNAwjfFR7f

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

“The researchers aim to show that the ‘inevitability’ of AI is just a marketing frame perpetrated by the industry and that pushback is a lot more possible than we often see.” Yes!

In Jan 1875, a young servant asked for and was given a Friday night off. She went home to see her boyfriend, who had five days leave, and he said... you should have more time off. Harriet, the servant, agreed. She wrote to her employer and said "I will be back on Monday"

Today is David Harvey's 90th birthday! To celebrate, preorder his upcoming book The Story of Capital and take 30% off all of his previously published works

If you're a National Trust member, it's that time of year again: Midnight tonight is the deadline. It's a shame people have to keep doing this to keep a toehold on historical truth in this country, but here we are. Voting link: www.nationaltrust.org.uk/who-we-are/a...

I am pleased to unleash upon the world my latest attempt to persuade people that the French Revolution was a very complex set of events that happened to a very complex society in ways it's best to try to understand as such.

Politico: "MPs should consider deleting X, according to a committee led by Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle... "On social media, the report said MPs should feel “empowered to step away from platforms that pose more harm than benefit.” Absolutely. Please get on with it.

This came through the door agents yesterday from two local estate agents. I’m going to keep it and set it as a primary source on the History of Housing/Tenancy module I’ll design one day. Easy 1,500 word assessment on the context, authorship, intended audience, symbolism of this.

"In 2023, 3.8 million dwellings failed to meet this ["decent"] standard. Private rented dwellings were most likely to be classed as non-decent - in all 21% were." Over one in five privately rented dwellings as 'non-decent' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

As I considered Hegel’s remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice, I couldn’t help but think that he forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

2/ ... which houses one quarter of the city's population: municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2023/07/04/m...

1/ Interesting piece by @PeteApps on cooperative housing in Zurich. Switzerland is a country which shows how well high quality public housing serves a mixed community. See also the next tweet in which I write about Zurich's municipal housing ... www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The students *loved* it. One said it was the best thing they've read at university. It is extremely teachable, especially alongside/against some of the more traditional Terror primary/secondary stuff.

Thrilled to say I'm a judge for the first ever Inspiring History Teaching Awards, in association with Historic Royal Palaces. Do you know a great history teacher in the UK who deserves to go down in history? Nominate them here bit.ly/42yhGZP

Really cool work here… returning to a time and place that was a foundational moment not just for urbanising Britain but also for the discipline of urban history and using new techniques to challenge a deeply embedded viewpoint! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Cofio Aberfan 🖤 We will never forget those that tragically lost their lives on October 21, 1966.

Congrats @emvchung.bsky.social for this guardian coverage of your new @historicaljnl.bsky.social article. Can’t wait to set it for first-year historians at @manchester.ac.uk to read alongside Engels on our course on capitalism

It might be a stretch for 41-year-old Adam Driver to play a 26-year-old, but I'm surely not the only one who thinks he would be a perfect casting for Saint-Just, right??

My intellectual and emotional response to reading this is that I want to get a hammer and physically destroy every AI machine on the face of the planet. It is a fundamentally anti-human device and its purveyors are as great a danger to our shared future as any gang of criminals or terrorists

Very excited to teach the Terror next week to my Level 3 students, using Michaela Kalcher's brilliant @historyworkshop.org.uk article as key reading doi.org/10.1093/hwj/...

It's Electric Wind publication day!💨 Join @dudleymarianna.bsky.social for the launch of her new book, online and at @bookhaus.bsky.social. Details on the MUP Events page🎟️👇 A cutting-edge history of wind power in Britain from the industrial revolution to the present. Electric Wind is out now💡

Whenever I see academics say this stuff, I physically wince knowing the environmental, ethical, and moral impact generative AI has. Academics using LLMs essentially validate the theft of colleagues’ work, condone its disastrous energy usage, and undermine the benchmark for academic integrity.

At @ihr.bsky.social we can now offer PhD by Publication in History! For those with a substantial body of existing published research (within past 10 years), but without a PhD, should be of particular interest to #heritage professionals and independent scholars!

Another case of MS spellcheck being selective with its wrongness: it auto-replaced my "Franco-Prussian" with "Franco-PRussian", then also flagged its new creation as a spelling error. It... it was once better than this, right?

300 applicants; no appointment

there’s this weird idea a lot of people seem to have about how all of us writers and artists must secretly want to use AI and are merely resisting temptation for ethical reasons, and like, no, it’s not hard for me to resist drinking the bowl of Piss With Glass In It actually

while I acknowledge that LLMs do have some uses for stuff like “producing code with knowledgeable human supervision,” this perfectly reflects how I feel about using it for my own creative work

I agree with every word Zelda Williams says. And this at the end from OpenAI makes me want to go full Ned Ludd. Creators can’t have a blanket opt-out on copyright infringement of their work and have to fill out a form appealing to OpenAI’s mercy every time? Fuck off into the sun

Join us online for another instalment of the Environmental Digital Humanities Seminar on October 15: Iason Jongepier and Vincent Ducatteeuw will present their digital historical work on the river Scheldt.

I'm developing a new course on the history of policing (with England, France, and USA as cases we will use) and am surprised that I'm not coming up with many examples of already-existing courses. Anyone teach something like this? #skystorians

Thoughts, @urbanhistorygroup.bsky.social ? @magdamaaoui.bsky.social is looking for social housing pioneers beyond France — who comes to mind?

Currently doing some work on Renée Gailhoustet and her pioneer work on French social housing. I put her in the same category of genius as Charlotte Perriand. Any other names that should be included in that group in your opinion?

Anyone else having issues with Cambridge Core @universitypress.cambridge.org ? It was working fine this morning, but just getting error messages (and panicked emails from students who can't access set readings for tomorrow...) all afternoon

Historians, archivists, librarians and historians working in the field of labour history. A starter pack to get you going… go.bsky.app/CUqdx9a

OpenAI's products are utterly unnecessary and run off of stolen human-made content. Students don't need them. Teachers don't need them. None of us need this regurgitated AI slop that didn't even exist four years ago.

The headline and framing of this looks very similar to @mikkelhoeghoej.bsky.social 's work on early C20 rats in Copenhagen, presented at @urbanhistorygroup.bsky.social

Starmer says past governments have been "squeamish" talking about immigration. Bullshit. Starmer isn't bravely breaking a taboo. He's blaming vulnerable people & deflecting attention from the super rich who hoard power & wealth. Want something better? join.greenparty.org.uk

V happy to share a new OA article in @pastpresentsoc.bsky.social written with Sim Koole. It’s about dock work, dockside life and the changing river in turn of the century Rotherhithe.

A residential landlord demanding that the tenant, as a standard contract term, sign over all rights to intellectual property accrued while working from their property. Like, literally, if you write a novel on the weekends, they want to own it. There is no end to these ****ers' greed.

Is it too late to change my proposed book cover, I wonder?

“a discussion about trans history became a springboard from which to imagine trans futures—futures that located epistemic authority and political power not in the clinic, but in community.” Fantastic and powerful piece by @echomikeromeo.bsky.social that deserves to be widely read

The truth: we need migration. The problem: too many politicians are terrified to say it. Why? They're led by a) toxicity of the charlatans & b) wealthy media organisations who demand these useful distractions rather than us talking about inequality. Reject it. Draw the line.

Second year of running a L3 France 1780-1871 course with 'character role cards' as part of the syllabus Each student gets a card in the first week with one of nine social classes/professions. I may have gone too suspenseful when setting up the new VLE though 1/2

Another powerful blog post and kudos @wadehistory.bsky.social I don’t think “ECR” works as a meaningful label any more E - “early” is based on an out of date PhD➡️ postdoc➡️ permanent timeline C - “career” is wildly optimistic for most of us R - how many of us in teaching jobs get paid to research?

Congratulations 🎊 to @rebeccawynter.bsky.social and @janetweston.bsky.social for a brilliant conference! 👏🏻 Lots of amazing papers including @historywill.bsky.social @sophiemhistory.bsky.social @stephemmabrown.bsky.social @henryyeomans.bsky.social 🌟 Looking forward to next steps 😀

New in the Proceedings of the British Academy series, ‘State-Making in an Age of Revolution’ reveals how governments across Europe expanded their reach after the 1848 revolutions through practical reform. Learn more through the link below ⬇️ https://bit.ly/4m7qKfb

Urban history folk, any helpers on this q? At the European Association for Urban History 2022 in Antwerp, someone gave a paper on a digital history project, reconstructing Haussmann-era Paris. It was a panel which also had Richard Rodger, I think. The EAUH website has scrubbed the programme...

For some reason the autocorrect on my browser and/or the university library catalogue has dialled up to 11. Not ideal as I finalise checking reading lists. Today, Robin Mitchell became Robin Kitchen and John Merriman became John Merman

This is the thing. I'm not someone who has ever voted for Labour, but I am someone who should be persuadable to vote for them. I'm not sure which of Lib Dem or Green I'm going to vote for next time, but I know I'm *not* voting for a party that's made it illegal for half my friends to exist in public