Sending best wishes for the new year on the occasion of Nowruz, for all who celebrate. Here, a moving recollection of family traditions The Politics of Spring: Nowruz and Cultural Continuity by Mohadeseh Salari Sardari

New 📖: James Morris, Revolution and Counterrevolution on the Russian–Ottoman Border: Wallachia in 1848 @oxfordunipress.bsky.social academic.oup.com/book/62436

Door of a Transylvanian wardrobe - 1793 or 1723? clasate.cimec.ro/Detaliu.asp?...

The poppy and the sunflower, Romanian folk lyric, 1875 (Marian, Poezii poporale) - has quite a hippy-era, Nick Drake feel

Programme du colloque "Quand les enfants voyagent : Histoires, expériences et représentations des enfants voyageurs", 26-27 mars 2026, Université d’Angers, organisé par A-F Quaireau et T. Williams avec le soutien des Pays de la Loire (PULSAR), CIRPaLL, SELVA, TEMOS, EnJeux et de la SFR Confluences.

“All signs suggest that history is not quite over. While both liberals and conservatives target Palestine solidarity activists in the name of anti-antisemitism, the Republican Party has a vocal and growing antisemitic base.” @blbalthaser.bsky.social reviews Mark Mazower's book On Antisemitism:

A Companion to the History of Moldavia up to 1859, edited by Florin Curta and Liviu Pilat (Brill): brill.com/edcollbook/t...

Sur Jacques Revel, grand passeur de la microstoria, qui vient de décéder www.lemonde.fr/disparitions...

Jürgen Habermas ist heute im Alter von 96 Jahren in Starnberg verstorben.

Many are the repositories whose digitized collections are held together by paper clips & twine paid for with an uncertain budget that may not get renewed in the next fiscal year because there’s long been a zeal to “just” digitize things but not to invest in their careful documentation & maintenance.

Research paper next Thursday: James Christian Brown (Univ. Bucharest) "A Scottish Gael in the Romanian Vineyard" New Europe College, Thu 19 March, 15.00-17.00 (Bucharest time) #travelwriting #gaelic #romania nec.ro/events/a-sco...

Typo of the day: turn-off-the-century

Sloppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse

Today is the Slovenian Valentine's Day #Gregorjevo (ptički se ženijo) birds’s matrimony! On this day St. Gregory tosses the lamp into the water as the days have become longer. Traditionally kids in Ljubljana float tiny rafts with lit candles in rivers. Ohrid has similar tradition, but for Epiphany.

Is this also why UK @nationalarchives.gov.uk.web.brid.gy website seems to be under pressure, reporting technical issues? discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk

Dear everyone, As per the post from the Bodleian librarian below, AI bots and scrapers are putting just about every website under great pressure, British History Online included. A lot of excellent tech staff are working hard to keep everything working, but outages and siruptions are inevitable.

I finally lost my shit about so-called AIs, LLMs, enshittification & everything fucking evil that @officialgrammarly.bsky.social is doing. I'm fucking furious, and not just about what 1 company has done. An open letter to Grammarly & the rest of the LLM hype machine www.moryan.com/an-open-lett...

I once had the persistence to get compensation from a low-cost airline - it was way harder than my PhD (although the training helped)

Been asked to write about printing in the Banat of Temesvar - so here is a copy of the first newspaper (1771) and a printed list of shareholders in the Timisoara casino (1838) mandadb.hu/dokumentum/1...

Cărți care te fac să înțelegi și să iubești Bucureștiul - mă bucur de recomandarea cărții "Un boem la Bucuresti" din partea Hotelului Cismigiu www.hotelcismigiu.ro/noutati/arti...

The Balkan origins of walking upright?

My PhD supervisor Professor Dennis Deletant is 80 - la mulți ani!

Vacancy for a fully funded 4-year PhD at @uvahumanities.bsky.social on the key roles played by social science, demography, and nutritional science during the blockades of the First and Second World Wars, especially where they related to food.

Golestan Palace is truly an incredible sight to behold. US/Israel are attacking Iran’s history and culture, not to mention its people.

"Technical issues" reported on @nationalarchives.gov.uk.web.brid.gy website and catalogue - hope not serious. Anyone know more? discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk

200 years ago, UCL was founded on a radical idea: education for all. To mark our bicentenary, the Two Centuries Here Exhibition explores UCL’s past, present, and future across our Bloomsbury campus. The exhibition is open from 18 Feb 2026 to 31 July 2027. #UCL200

I reviewed "Le voyage dans les Balkans" for the journal Viatica, no. 13 (2006) journals.openedition.org/viatica/6856

Saying farewell to my allotment which I have cultivated for ten happy years - remember the good times

„„Un boem la București" este mai mult decât o simplă colecție de texte; este o frescă istorică, o mărturie prețioasă a unui București dispărut, dar ale cărui ecouri se mai resimt și astăzi. O lectură esențială" - thanks "Anticar"! www.magazinul-de-carte.ro/carte/67fea/...

Emailed a chimney sweep to ask a question, the reply came back like #truestory

“On a conference call last month hosted by Expatsi, a relocation company, almost 400 Americans signed up to learn how to move to Albania.” www.wsj.com/us-news/amer...

I love concentrating and writing. But it’s becoming harder and harder to shut off notifications and carve out the time. I think that’s deliberate - if we are kept small and fretful we comply more easily… meaningful concentration is becoming some weird luxury and even I have to remind myself to do it

Unprepossessing person in the news is said to have a DPhil in History (Oxford) - it's weirdly hard to find out what it's on. Apparently it was not standard to deposit copies with the library or otherwise make formal institutional record?

Autopieography

We are pleased to invite you to an evening talk with bestselling author and EU Prize for Literature winner Tatiana Țîbuleac, who will discuss how #Moldovan, #Romanian and diasporic history and identities reflect throughout her writing. 🗓️ 13 March at 5pm ➡️ www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanit...

The courses prepared the teachers, not the other way around

🗃️ , #skystorians interested in #18thC, #histnetworks and #corruption, tune in tomorrow from 16 EET (15 CET) to hear about networks, public finance, and much more in 18thC #Transylvania, live & online from the famed New Europe College in Bucharest. nec.ro/events/de-in...

I use Messenger for this (if I emailed myself interesting ideas they would get lost in work email..)

“Great Man” theories of history may have been wrong but “That F*ing Guy” theory looks increasingly plausible.

"The Marriage Customs of the Romanian Peasants" - last year I discovered an unknown study from 1837 by Romanian historian Mihail Kogălniceanu and republished it with a commentary. (In Romanian) Now #OpenAccess in @researchgate.bsky.social www.researchgate.net/publication/...

If the UCL case resulted in a confidential out-of-court settlement does that mean we don't get to see the case documents? Wd be curious to see the actual case (and wonder what legal advice my alma mater @ucl.ac.uk took..)

The Rohonc Codex: Hungary’s Mysterious Manuscript That No One Can Read

Before it meant what people think it means today, τεχνολογία meant rhetoric, systems of grammar (and λογοτεχνία means literature).

🔴NEW: The principal of the University of Edinburgh has confirmed he is working a paid second job while overseeing cuts that have seen hundreds of staff leave the institution. Read the full story: https://www.theferret.scot/edinburgh-job-loss-mathieson/

King Carol I of Romania, depicted as a teacher, thrashes Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria for his cheeky response to a lesson on geography, as other students, other heads of state, look on in a political cartoon about the Second Balkan War in 1913.

Cartoon

It's snowing in Bucharest (1854)

"Claude told me that 'political theory may be the one field where "stochastic parrot" is actually a compliment, since the whole discipline consists of creatively recombining things Tocqueville and Mill already said'. Ouch”

"si l'Auteur n'est pas majeur, le contrat devra être signé avec son représentant légal" - I am reviewing for a French-language academic journal and it's nice that they allow for the possibility of child contributors

My review of Timothy Olin, The Banat of Temesvar: Borderland Colonization in the Habsburg Monarchy (Stanford UP) is published in "Austrian History Yearbook": www.cambridge.org/core/journal...