Update
05.03.2026 18:23
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Update
Photo of Marie Legendre giving a paper on early Caliphate tax regimes
Fantastic to hear Marie Legendre's paper on early Caliphate tax regimes at @imems.bsky.social. It included a great story about the keeper of a cheetah in Abbasid Egypt who was paid in honey...
Image of a book jacket for Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions by Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth.
Full book jacket just dropped, and we're pretty happy with it. Huge thanks to @cecilefromont.bsky.social, @soccerpolitics.bsky.social, Alice, and AndrΓ©s for your generous words! #earlymodern #BeyondTheOcean global.oup.com/academic/pro...
Call for Panelists: FHCS/SHCF-sponsored panel at African Studies Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, December 3-6, 2026. Submit your abstract to this Google Form by March 8, 2026
nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...
Happy Holi! Painting by an artist from Vellore, 1820s. @britishlibrary.bsky.social Add.Or.66, full page and detail showing women.
#earlymodern
Raises some important issues but also ignores the fact that many Humanities staff outside the magic circle are facing redundancy. They are naturally willing, indeed desperate, to apply for entry-level Oxbridge posts. The situation is grim. 1/2
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A plate of various cheeses in front of a PowerPoint slide with the words βTasting Historyβ.
Two presenters in front of a PowerPoint slide.
Man looking pensively at a table of cheese bathed in late winter sunshine.
Yesterday, on the first sunny day of the year, @cheesetastingco.bsky.social and I
ran the Tasting History event at Birkbeck. We tasted cheese, had a conversation with a brilliant audience, and hopefully brought to life the history of the trade and the people who made it happen.
What can medieval England teach us about modern work-life balance? From sick leave allowances to negotiated time off, Alex Brown & @graceowen.bsky.social from @durhamhistory.bsky.social have found that medieval working life was more structured than many assume.
Find out more:π bit.ly/3ZC7i1c
Fluffy cat curled up for a nap on a tartan blanket
Timeline cleanse
Thanks for this. I speak of Cassin's views on refugees in βTraditions in Canadaβs engagement with the global refugee regimeβ in Benson, Milner & Nakache, eds. Canada & the Global Refugee Regime: Continuity, Change, Challenges & Critiques, U of Toronto Press, Spring 2026. www.mqup.ca/Books/C/Cana...
Fantastic to make it to Durham Oriental Museum yesterday! Highlights for me were this Tang dynasty female polo player, a katar or push dagger that asks who would win, an elephant or a tiger, and an 11th century bowl from Jingdezhen that slipped in the kiln and fused. Very much relate to the latter!
I'm very gutted to be unable to make this!
Written Worlds: Non-Elite Writers in Early Modern England Who wrote in early modern England? What did they write and why did they write it? How did their writing fit into the wider worlds that they inhabited? In this talk, Sue Wiseman, Brodie Waddell and Michael Powell Davies β all from Birkbeck University of London β will address these questions by introducing their ongoing Leverhulme-funded collaborative project on non-elite writers in England from c.1570 to 1730. Our research explores the writing practices of people below the level of the gentry and clergy, considering their biographical contexts, their motivations and their contributions to written culture. In addition to giving a birdβs eye view of the sorts of writers and texts we are studying, each of the three speakers will discuss a couple of specific examples of particular writers, including the notebooks of a midland villager, the spiritual diary a London wigmaker, and the confessions of a condemned widow. Hybrid | IHR Wolfson Room NB02, Basement, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, or Online-via Zoom. 5 Mar 2026 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Slide titled Written World with a seventeenth-century painting of a woman writing in a book.
There might be some Other News happening today, but the really important announcement is that...
Sue Wiseman, Michael Powell-Davies and I will be talking about #WrittenWorlds in early modern England at @ihrscb.bsky.social on Thurs March 5th! ποΈ
Register here:
www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...
Footnote describing digitised archival documents in Spain that are so difficult to find the author gives the very specific search terms that have to be used to find them on the online portal.
Historians' footnotes in the age of (shoddy) digitisation. The trouble is they'll have probably updated the portal in a few years time and this method will no longer work...
Permanent post in the history of the Middle East after 1800 at York!
Plus three fixed term posts
1) Medieval History 1100-1450
2) Modern China
3) Britain/Public History
Sack that used to hold affidavits.
Label on an affidavits sack
I still get a thrill when I open up an archive box and find the original sack that used to hold the records. This is an 18th Century sack used for holding King's Bench affidavits [TNA KB 1/3]
Good morning! Have you seen our *brand new* issue? Featuringβ¦
Michel de Waele on Henri III and the Catholic League
doi.org/10.1093/fh/c...
ποΈ(1/7)
I find this so fucking sad actually
it's from a great article by @bildoperationen.bsky.social
journals.openedition.org/transbordeur...
I don't think she's ever been particularly impressive, but (another) low point was her support of operation raise the colours while boasting about her union jack bunting. Deeply cringeworthy...
Delighted to share the Call for Papers for a special issue of French Historical Studies on the theme "European-Indigenous Relations in the French Americas" (to be co-edited by Scott Berthelette and myself)
CFP and submission guidelines can be found here:
read.dukeupress.edu/french-histo...
Interesting piece. I get the point about not wanting to theorise walking to think about the past, but it has a really interesting history in and of itself, which Paul Readman has written about as "a pedestrianised form of historical knowing".
In his own robotic recitation over the weekend, Bezos explained his logic for the cuts, such as it is. βEach and every day our readers give us a roadmap to success,β he said. βThe data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.β The prospect of a paper that flatters its readers by regurgitating what they already click is familiar and depressing. It puts me in mind of Bezosβs other marquee product, another service that dealt a disastrous blow to books. On Amazon, the glorious inconvenience of browsing shelves or combing through piles has been eliminated. There is no occasion to pick up an unfamiliar book out of sheer curiosity. Every book that the siteβs algorithm recommends is similar to one that you have purchased already. In this way, you encounter nothing but iterations of yourself forever. It is a world in which the customer is always right. But if you didnβt want to be proved wrong, if you didnβt want to be altered or antagonized in ways that you could never predict, why would you read at all? β¦
A former book critic at Washington Post Book World wrote about last week's cuts, and while the whole thing is worth reading, the end cuts through the bullshit of algorithm/click-driven generated content to articulate the need for actual criticism and culture.
www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...
Check it out, we're planning a special issue of @frenchhistory.bsky.social for the 700th anniversary of the advent of the Valois dynasty! Details and timeline at the link below, but don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions π
Late 18th Century painting of a royal hunting scene in the planes of Golconda, led by Nizam Ali Khan of Hyderabad. In the painting's top right hand corner, the famous female poet and performer, Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, observes the scene from her palanquin.
g.co/arts/E8r3oEH...
New article by Katherine Astbury and Abigail Coppins, 'French prisoner-of-war sociability in Hampshire during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars'
Open Access here: doi.org/10.1093/fh/c...
@frenchhistory.bsky.social
Interesting - thanks!
How has that been going? I've heard AI-based assessments can result in clustered grades?
