There should be some sort of support group for people researching their family history and coming across YET ANOTHER gruesome and unnatural death, handled with typical subtlety by the late Victorian press.

Just been invited to the launch event of a report considering the 'future of the UK's research system' where they will be considering the creation of disruption labs named after Ada Lovelace and the report will be introduced by a panel of five men

Having survived the rigours of the #FirstWorldWar, soldiers faced the return to civilian life. For some, it presented an even greater challenge. 🔓 This archive article is free for #ArmisticeDay www.historytoday.com/archive/feat...

every single week they're throwing this guy a special oval office love-in that appears to be the presidential equivalent of letting your dog scarf an entire big mac and fries before that last trip to the vet

Look at this great fund. £200 for really small charities to spend on boring things. Easy, quick to apply. Link below. Please share :)

Poor Strathclyde #UniversityChallenge

Once every 20 years or so, the director-general of the BBC is forced to resign for being insufficiently rightwing. Alastair Milne in 1987. Greg Dyke in 2004. Tim Davie in 2025. The great irony is that the BBC was in all cases profoundly biased towards established power. But just not biased enough …

A beautiful #essay about family, writing, grief, history & searing & invisible contexts of the cost war by @cathfeely.bsky.social #mustread

Loving today's news that the mysterious "fedora man" outside the Louvre heist was actually a 15-year-old museum visitor who dresses like a 1940s French detective all the time, just because. apnews.com/article/louv...

the Duncan Tanner prize not only showcases the very best of early career scholarship in modern British history year after year, but the committee also give every entrant considered and generous feedback on their scholarship. it's win/win - do enter your work! academic.oup.com/tcbh/pages/e...

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

For Remembrance Sunday, a short reflection on the life and death of my great grandfather in the twenty years after his return. botheringmiancestors.substack.com/p/the-trench...

My annual post about how the Morning Star reported the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 hatfulofhistory.com/2014/11/07/h...

Making plans for the day and I think I've just said one of the most profound things to ever leave my mouth: 'There are things I will absolutely not do and standing in silence in Tapi Carpets for two minutes is one of them,'

Well, that was pure joy #Strictly

Not enough attention is being paid to the effective closure of the bulk of one of the 2 or 3 most important public archives for modern British history. A terrible own goal for the BBC as a public-service agency.

'More than 1,000 staff will be affected as Cardiff University undertakes a “massive” restructuring of its professional services team.' After all, it's a policy that is/has gone so very swimmingly well at every other university that's implemented it...

UKHE does appear to have decided that a good student experience is more like the interchangeable consistency of a Nero than the incredible coffee in your local independent cafe.

How is the digital creative? Check out Jamie Wood’s article ‘Creativity&Historical Inquiry in Digital Spaces’. It’s the penultimate early view article for @cathfeely.bsky.social &my special issue on creative history for @hisjournalha.bsky.social! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

It's remembrance remembrance day

Mamdani: "We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves. After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him."

sometimes I wonder what did academics do in the time before composing and sending hundreds of emails a day

After a few days off with illness/annual leave, I am getting myself together today so if you are expecting an email from me you might get it today. Bear with me.

China sought to halt research by Laura Murphy at Sheffield Hallam University into allegations Uyghur Muslims in East Turkestan were subject to forced labour. China has faced accusations that it has committed genocide against the Uyghur population. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

My mum is in surgery today and it should be pretty routine but if you do that sort of thing, can you say a prayer? More for her anxious and absent daughter more than my more than capable resilient mother.

Aftermath of war The experiences & treatment of ex-servicemen, physically or psychologically affected by the First World War, seen through archives relating to the 'sweated trades' in the 1910s & 1920s More sources on working people & disability digitised & indexed at warwick.ac.uk/services/lib...

Vito, man. Amazing. #Strictly

Museum at Castleton Visitor Centre in the Peak District, Derbyshire, is to close after 20 years. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I've actually got rid of loads of books in the last year but I still have loaded three cars worth and I'm not even half way through all the books I have to move. Having lots of books is overrated.

Absolutely howling at ITN newsreader pointedly referring to 'Mr Mountbatten-Windsor'.

Jerry on 'The Good Life' just stated that he was 42. 42. I am shook.

On further reflection, handing operation of our Universities over to a professional administrative class with no personal investment in the educational mission of the university or the creation and maintenance of knowledge might have been somewhat in error.

No amount of small treats is going to change the fact that people don't get paid enough. No amount of small treats is going to change the fact that people don't get paid enough. No amount of small treats is going to change the fact that people don't get paid enough. Buy your treats.

If you want some critical background on what is going to be an undoubted spectacle as the Grand Egyptian Museum opens this weekend, here’s one I wrote earlier: www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42719

The Trump administration’s lawlessness cannot be ignored. Period.

This is one of a series of daily cholera returns for September 1866 that survive within the records of the Cardiff Poor Law Union. When asked to comment on the sanitary condition of the locality, medical attendant Edward Hill has noted ‘Abominable, a marvel that cholera is ever absent’.

"But we also lend ourselves to the library — committing our attention, our time, our presence at board meetings, our tax dollars and donations — enlarging the commons and participating in the political project of making an informed society." 💕

Whatever strategy you’re about to suggest, we’ve thought about it. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Also: BADGES.

"We’ve made it about individuals, because the academic research system is very focused on the individual level, and that’s something we really need to break,” she said. Yes, break the focus on individuals. After all, the system is doing its best to break individuals altogether at this time. 1/3

Teaching the histories of slavery and keen to inform your students with insights from the most recent research? Just a month to go before @uclpress.bsky.social publishes this open access (free to download) expert volume. uclpress.co.uk/book/teachin...

Public service announcement: your phone does not need to go "PING!!" every time a text comes in - especially if you're in the quiet carriage. The rest of the train does not need to be alerted to this Very Important Stream of Messages.

🗃️

Suitably angry letter re: the disappointing govt education white paper with its focus on education for employment and the absence of any mention of adult education. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

NB: the opaquely funded extremist magazine Spiked, here given airtime by BBC News, is the successor to Living Marxism, which sunk by a libel suit from ITN in 2000

On Friday 21 November we host the 2025 RHS Anniversary Lecture given this year by Prof. Jane Ohlmeyer (Trinity College Dublin): bit.ly/48NJHR5 ‘Visible | Invisible: Voices of Women in Early Modern Ireland‘ 6pm, at Mary Ward House, London, and online. Booking now open and all welcome. #Skystotrians

This week we look forward to publication, on Thursday, of the next in the Society's New Historical Perspectives book series: 'Atlantic Isles: Travel and Identity in the British and Irish West, 1880–1940' by Gareth Roddy bit.ly/4o9iblT Available free Open Access from @uolpress.bsky.social 1/2

The kids just don't appreciate Dickens enough anymore. #UniversityChallenge

British Library workers are sick of poor pay, overwork, and feeling the fallout of a cyber-attack which left them vulnerable to identity theft and blackmail. Now, they are going on strike for a fortnight. tribunemag.co.uk/2025/10/from...