Helen Smith

Job Opportunity!

The Culture & Craft of Wood Type | Rare Book School Course Length: 30 hours Course Week: 12–17 July 2026 Format: in person, York, UK Fee: $1,495 This course offers an in-depth engagement with the culture and craft of wood type, with a core focus on the...

🚨 Two @rarebookschool.bsky.social courses coming to York in July!
@wordsmith.bsky.social 'The Culture & Craft of Wood Type' & @jenniebatchelor.bsky.social 'The Rise of Periodical Print Culture'
rarebookschool.org/courses/typo...
rarebookschool.org/courses/hist...
🗃️ #bookhistory #earlymodern #18thC

In 2-3 pages, please provide evidence for how you meet every one of a 17-page list of criteria and how you excel in several.

If you’re a #Humanities #ECR & in/willing to travel to York on 17 December, join me & the @historylabplus.bsky.social team for our 2025 ‘Christmas Connections’ event, a FREE & informal opportunity to support each other, build professional connections, & sample the city’s heritage & eatables. 👇&🧵

I might have missed it, but I'm surprised no-one has picked old-fashioned printing. It's great to see pixels people getting hands on with ink and type!

An amazing opportunity for a PhD and a 4-year postdoc on this important project with the brilliant and lovely @smschober.bsky.social - hair, race, trade and multispecies history!

#EarlyModern 🗃️

House prices will be our last bulwark against fascism.

Thank you! That is really interesting to know.

Please do not tell me it is time for my annual password update. I can't update my password, there are no more passwords, the universe is empty of passwords, it is all void.

Still fighting my losing battle against capitalising articles after a colon.

do my clever and knowledgeable followers have examples of historians writing (eg journal article or book chapter) about their own *failures* in interesting ways? eg research goes wrong, wrong questions etc 🗃️

I am in the middle of writing something a bit like this, although I am not a historian and it remains to be seen whether the end result will be interesting!

Please can someone come up with a flowchart for 'Is the Union Flag racist?', with Gerri Halliwell's dress featuring on one side and anything funded by Tommy Robinson and his right-wing mates marked out clearly on the other?

This question is opening up a whole new world of nun-rear adjacent foodstuffs!

Books are assumed to be middle-class & decorative. People who read are assumed to have space to house them & leisure to read them. Wanting to have books to consult at work is seen as self-indulgent rather than practical, despite copious evidence that we read and remember physical books differently.

The more I think about it, the more furious I am at the class politics barely hidden in the refusal to consider books as serious scholarly tools. Universities don't tell physicists they need to keep their lasers at home.

Amazing! And now I'm hungry.

Interesting...

Quite a niche question today. Does anyone know if the phrase 'a nun's buttock' or similar is in any way proverbial in France?

And wondering if I could carry off the greeting proposed by John Eliot in 1593: 'Come, cullion let me crush thy callibisters with accoling thy buttockes. Shake handes.'

I am writing more about buttocks today than I had anticipated.

In London, hate will never win.

How we talk about history is the issue where the media and political discourse is perhaps most out of touch with how out of touch Nigel Farage is with the British public, outside his core vocal minority

Double digits is a lot.

With apologies for making you feel ancient, Anna Elizabeth Smith is 10!!!!!!!! today!

Can't wait to see it!

Oh how gorgeous! It's beautiful.

Eurostar waitress spotted my daughter gnawing on a block of parmesan, in preference to her train meal.

'Oh, you're living your best life right now', she cried. 'No need to hide the cheese, I'm French.'

A plethora of new ODNB entries on early modern women stationers! Entries from Heidi Craig, Andrea Silva, Kirk Melnikoff, @mgyarn.bsky.social, Andreas P. Bassett, @tarallyons.bsky.social and @georginaemw.bsky.social, me, and of course from @valeriewayne.bsky.social who cooked up the whole cluster.

A whole article about changes in the sector that doesn't once consider the possibility that universities should be funded to educate students.