Kris Inwood

Fascinating article looking at respiratory viruses in a Swiss school setting finds that bad air quality in the classroom, not close proximity, is the dominant driver of viral spread.

Close proximity: RR 1.16
Shared classroom: RR 3.17
Suboptimal air quality: 1.90

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

WIC reduces birth weight disparities between black and white babies.

www.nber.org/papers/w34521

This is a wonderful thread. Scholarship, creativity, a portrait of a generation.

Vous pouvez maintenant accéder au numéro de décembre du bulletin d'information numérique de la SHC, La rubrique Histoire! #histoire #cdnhist cha-shc.ca/fr/publicati...

Happy to announce a 4th edition of the Workshop in Economic History in Uppsala, with the great @essobecker.bsky.social as keynote! Workshop takes places on May 28-29, 2026, in Uppsala. Apply by January 31, 2026.

Here is the Cfp: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/6xdmp...

"The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, and (3) athletic recruitment...The three factors...are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes..."

My joint paper “Public good or public bad? Nation-building and indigenous institutions” is in press at the Journal of Development Economics!
We show how Indigenous institutions, capturing Indigenous mobilisation, shaped nation-building efforts in post-revolutionary Mexico. doi.org/10.1016/j.jd...

Book review: 'Het middeleeuwse openbare badhuis' by Fabiola van Dam (2020) I recently read ‘Het middeleeuwse openbare badhuis’ by Fabiola van Dam, I read it twice.

Theres now also a substack version of my review of this great Dutch book about medieval bathhouses that needs to be published in more languages!

‘Het middeleeuwse openbare badhuis’ by Fabiola van Dam (2020)
fakehistoryhunter.substack.com/p/book-revie...
WP:
fakehistoryhunter.net/2024/07/15/b...

Screen capture of a book cover. It's a white background with a picture of part of a multicolored lobster dominating the bottom 2/3 of the cover. Book title is Contested catch: lobster, localism and Canada's Atlantic coast, 1870 to 1970

It's finally here. A history of the Nova Scotia lobster fishery.

Morton is truly an historian's historian, and from the installments I've seen, the book is going to have riches of social history, politics, economics, and even some marine biology.

share.google/J3GYgjTkjV9I...

On Drought, Dowsing, and Deep Drilling: Thinking About Groundwater History in an Age of Climate Emergency Canada’s 2025 drought exposed groundwater precarity; in the past, Ottawa Valley settlers adapted to this precarity through dowsing, augers, and evolving well technologies.

Today we have "On Drought, Dowsing, and Deep Drilling: Thinking About Groundwater History in an Age of Climate Emergency" by @forrestpass.bsky.social

“When European settlers arrived in the region in the nineteenth century, they found the groundwater perplexing.”

niche-canada.org/2025/11/28/o...

Congratulations Erik Olssen — 2025 New Zealand Historical Association Award for Contribution to New Zealand History. #NZHistory #HistoryMatters #history @universityofotago.bsky.social

useful reflections in this thread

I had a great conversation with a librarian last year where she said the instability and general inability to reliably trace bots as a reference source are sort of a perfect storm. Students "research" w the tool, but repeating the search doesn't yield a stable output.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗮 𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗮𝗿𝗺 𝗶𝗻 𝗦𝗶𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗮 𝗟𝗲𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗮𝗶𝘄𝗮𝗻𝗲𝘀𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝗲 𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗱𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗼𝗺𝗮𝗰𝘆? 🌾

Join us for this 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝘃𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝗶𝗻 𝗔𝘀𝗶𝗮 talk by Yitang Lin!

Zoom registration: seow.scholars.harvard.edu/STinAsia

#histstm #histsci #envhist 🧪

The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure invites applications for a two-week Summer School on ‘Micro-Census Insights into Historical Households, Mortality and Fertility’, held at University of Cambridge from July 6-17th, 2026. Application deadline February 2 2026.

Prasad previously announced that he intends to start with the conclusions he wants and work backwards to produce the "evidence."

sciencebasedmedicine.org/pbem/

Carolingian Biodiversity How Interdisciplinary Can and Should Work

Wow! @lollardfish.bsky.social & @profgabriele.com going all in on a new study using pollen to document biodiversity at & around the Abbey of St Gall in the Carolingian Age. buttondown.com/ModernMediev... #MedievalSky #interdisciplinarity

Hot off the press! What was the Cold War and what are its consequences? 10 articles and 3 comments in a delightful new issue of Social Science History @socscihistory.bsky.social offer fresh perspectives. Organized by Mitchell Stevens and Ioan Sendroiu, and introduced by Silvia Pedraza. Open access!

A student is working on detecting gaps in text transcriptions. Does anyone in #DigiClass or beyond know of open transcriptions of ancient Greek inscriptions, in EpiDoc or otherwise, similar to papyri.info ? I've worked with literary texts and papyri, but I'm stumped on this.

Wednesday 26 November 2025, noon (EST) Christopher Barrie, New York University "Reasoning models and synthetic data generation" Christopher Barrie is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, at New York University as well as Core Faculty at CSMaP and a Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. His research interests include computational methods, generative AI, political attitudes, communication, protest, conflict and MENA. He holds a DPhil in Sociology from Oxford.

Very happy to host Chris Barrie tomorrow at noon EST on "Reasoning models and synthetic data generation".
All welcome.
Zoom: utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970
Details: rohanalexander.com/tdw.html

Orchestra playing on a platform at one end of a church. Tall female conductor. Christmas tree at the back. Dawn to dusk series of paintings on the curved back wall.

Stockbridge & New Town Orchestra 30th anniversary concert, Sunday 30 Nov 2025, 3:15pm. 🎻🎶
Includes: Mahler, Grieg - Peer Gynt, Sousa - Liberty Bell, Skating with Mr Gow. Family friendly.
Stockbridge Parish Church, Saxe Coburg Place, #Edinburgh. £7.50 at the door.
#concert #music
www.snco.org.uk

“Mosaic Database: Consolidation, Innovation, and Challenges in the Comparative Family Demography of Historical Europe,” published in SSH 49(1), won the 2025 Louis Henry Award given by the European Society of Historical Demography. Congrats to the authors! shorturl.at/OWQts #sociology #demography

Big thank you to Diana Magnuson!

I'm deeply honored to have received the Founder's Prize for the best article of the year in Social Science History. It's especially meaningful because SSHA has been such a generative and welcoming community for me as the co-chair of the Historical Geography and HGIS network.

Writing builds resilience by changing your brain, helping you face everyday challenges Resilience is often presented as feats of bravery and endurance. But everyday practices like journaling, drafting a text or even writing a to-do list are manifestations of a capacity to adapt.

Could be true. I started writing circa 1952, still at it, still here. Writing builds resilience by changing your brain, helping you face everyday challenges theconversation.com/writing-buil...

Title page) Title page with centered serif text reading “Close Race: Harnessing Multiracialism to Reduce Racial Prejudice*”. Below is the author name “Jasmine English†” and below that the date “October 31, 2025”, all centered with white background.

Screenshot of the paper’s abstract in serif font. The text explains that multiracial populations are the fastest growing in the U.S., and the paper examines how learning about African Americans with Irish ancestry influences racial attitudes among white Irish Americans. It reports experimental findings showing that such information reduces racial prejudice, especially among Republicans and those with higher baseline prejudice, and suggests multiracialism may reduce perceived racial distance.

Figure 1: Racial Resentment) Coefficient plot titled “Treatment Effects: Racial Resentment.” The x-axis is Coefficient Estimate with a dashed vertical zero line. Four rows correspond to Treat, TreatLinked, TreatClose, and Treat*Important. The interaction terms show larger negative estimates (around −0.05 to −0.18) than in Figure 2, indicating stronger reductions in racial resentment. Model estimates are color-coded and labeled in a legend at bottom left.

Table 7: Reduced Racial Essentialism “I was actually very surprised, it’s a much larger percentage than I realized. I guess I’ve been raised that white people are much more likely to be Irish.” “I was really surprised. I honestly had no idea and just thought, like me, Irish is basically white.” “I am surprised, as I think of typical Irish Americans to be very white.” “I was surprised - I had no idea. Usually when I think “Irish” I think of very fair skin, red hair, and blue eyes (like my mom)” “I was surprised! The term African American makes me think their lineage would be purely African, but I suppose no one really has ancestry tied to one place and one place only.” “I was surprised as I believed that Irish people were overwhelmingly White. It makes me more course to know about how such a high percentage of African Americans came to have Irish ancestry.” “That is surprising to me. I always picture people with more fair skin being Irish.” “I was surprised, but once I thought about it made sense. Eventually all of us will have a little bit of all ancestries in us.” Notes: Open-ended responses that illustrate a shift away from racial essentialism among treated respondents.

“Experimental data from largest online survey of Irish Americans reveal learning about African Americans with Irish ancestry reduces prejudice among white Irish Americans who identify with Irish American identity, and effects are mostly driven by Republicans…” www.jasmineenglish.net/uploads/1/4/...

Line graph showing cumulative state adoption of chiropractic boards over time

I'm John Fallon, a labor economist on the job market. My JMP uncovers something wild: when chiropractors got licensed in the early 1900s, medical boards responded by making it HARDER to become a doctor.

Why would competition lead to stricter regulations?
🧵

john-fallon-econ.com

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Do you work on #domesticabuse #divorce #economicabuse #childcustody in the third sector/policy? Then we have the workshop for you! 'Archives to Action' is a free 1-day workshop exploring the important role archival research can play in policy reform. Details 👇
www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/new...

An honor and dream come true to perform alongside Yo-Yo Ma, presented by Celebrity Series at Boston Symphony Hall. 💜

🎼Ave Maria (Bach/Gounod)

overview of the first comprehensive employment pension in the US, presented by George Alter & Sam Williamson at the 50th anniversary meeting of the Social Science History Association @socscihistory.bsky.social

George Alter presents to the 50th anniversary meeting of the Social Science History Association @socscihistory.bsky.social under the watchful eyes of co-auth Sam Williamson & economic network rep Peter Meyer.

Sam Williamson & George Alter present their important research on workers & their pensions of the Pennsylvania RR system c1900. The pension plan was reserved for white male employees. Men in strenuous careers often moved down the occupation ladder as they aged. Watchmen and guards were jobs for older men. Almost 12% of retirees were 'watchmen'. Lively discussion at the 50th anniversary meeting of the Social Science History Association @socscihistory.bsky.social.

George Alter & Sam Williamson discuss the 1st pensions for Pennsylvania RR workers at the 50th anniversary SSHA meeting. Men in strenuous occupations often shifted to less demanding jobs as they aged. Late retirees lived longer. Locomotive engineers & conductors were well paid for travelling work.