Dr Dave Hitchcock

The lady lumberjack with the YouTube and the sage love advice is a better model of masculinity than 90% of cis male podcasters. Facts.

Add good hygiene and even a modicum of fashion sense and congratulations you might, might! be ready to talk to a woman like she's a person!

Instead of reading Ian Dunt substacks men should try being nice and well-meaning himbos who, it turns out, also read literature

and that included to the excise I think in the c18th.

Well it depends on the period certainly but Fleet prison in London existed entirely to lock up debtors who didn't / couldn't pay their debts.

Removing departments is about removing academic nodes of power and autonomy (and plenty of attendant responsibility by the way) and it is being done practically everywhere outside of college system unis. It always leads to consolidation of power and budget lines in fewer hands. Always.

British History in the Long 18th Century Supported by Mark Storey and Carey Karmel, in memory of Arthur Burns

Autumn schedule for @ihr.bsky.social 's British History in the Long 18th Century fortnightly seminar is now live. @long18thsem.bsky.social. Join us in person at the IHR in London or on Zoom, for Mansfield on the Chevalier d'Eon, servants' travel, rhetorics of slavery, Bengal textile workers & more.

did... a lamb shank write this?

Do universities presently lack integrity? If so is that in any way a function of the last decade of government policy on the sector?

Anyway. These agencies just rotate the pitch. They never do any of the ACTUAL work, btw. The net outcome is always a single snazzy video. A single photography session. A homepage and course page 'mockup' (desktop not mobile, of course)

And a 'brand bible' that doesn't pass basic accessibilty tests.

Sign the Petition Stop Mass Redundancies at Lancaster University – Hold Senior Management Accountable

Hello UK friends - please, please could you sign this petition against the job cuts at my place of work - 1 in 4 us will be out of a job by August next year if we don't stop the cuts. And once you've signed it, please share. We need your help! www.change.org/p/stop-mass-...

This is the paper I gave to historians about “AI” last week. I was at Queen Mary University in London last week at a charming conference that turned out to be mainly about modern British history. I…

Basically this is more bullshit from the bullshit peddlers, but it is all in service to shifting the narrative around LLMs. History should be the very *last* thing we let a chatbot do. 3/3

medium.com/@hitchcockia...

The claim that history has high "ai applicability" is simply unproven, and highly dubious. The immense volume of analogue material unavailable to an AI but central to historical inquiry is one thing. The utter lack of intent, nuance, and complexity is another. 2/3

While this report is clearly confabulation, we should talk about it anyways. My guess is that they looked at the number of "history-related" queries into the chatbot and that's why history is up there for "AI applicability". This is yet another front in the endless push to normalise use of LLMs. 1/3

Amazon review of Pride and Prejudice, left by carlton p morgan on 30 July 2010: "Just a bunch of people going to each other's houses"

Happy 15th anniversary of the peak achievement of literary criticism, to all who celebrate

I'll be keeping an eye out for that book of yours. It's a super important topic and you've got me already by putting the swerve in there. Awful fuckin' book, that one.

One like one early modern opinion

It does and they're very different I think. I'm not the guy for post-industrial histories of anything really, other than that I'm p-sure modernists still underestimate the number of human workers involved, or rather the volume of work, when it comes to "modernised" post-industrial economies.

Sure but I'm talking about wages relative to costs of living. There's been *at best* one thirty year period where being a secretary-level jobber somewhere was not poverty level wages (It was like 1965 to 1995 give or take in "the west"). And knowledge worker growth is more recent then 150yrs.

Best part of this is the image of Manchin's very punchable face is off-centre, and when looking at it front on, it's off to the right.

"We have since learned new information, including from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp that Anne Frank was suffering from typhus, and have updated our story to add context about her health problems."

Marx and Engel's biggest philosophical "get", imo, was that they got the real effects of the industrial revolution, at least when it comes to the material conditions of most of the labouring people who powered it.

The biggest expansion brought in by 'the industrial revolution' was waged labour. Wage labour is a thing you do if you don't own much, comparatively. Wage labouring in the c19th and casual workers right now outside a home depot? All that is v.similar and very close in shape to platform capitalism.

Generally, yes, because so far there's no "industrialisation" process that isn't colonial. Explicitly colonial contexts often show this most clearly. I'm not expert but industrialisation in pre-Independence India was emphatically not a story of upward class mobility.

We going to end up with a kind of gated community internet, one that most users can see, but never access. Where paying allows for a modicum of clarity and information hygiene and credit. That will all be unaffordable or unavailable to most and outside the gates will endless slop, ads, trash.

I think Skinner did an interesting essay on political economy and origins of and so on in one of his many cam volumes, and there's a special collection in HJ called 'Malthusian moments' that has interesting essays:

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

(cause it covers this stuff too, in pursuit of the story of population). Ted's got all the footnotes for chasing on more of the 18th pol econ stuff too.

A recent social history of that for c18th yet to be written I think (perhaps since lab theory of value is political economy stuff, while wage labour now a cliometrics thing). But I've recommended Ted McCormick's latest book elsewhere here for other reasons, I think you'd find it very interesting.

it's a bit literary and less popular in its aims but Nicolazzo, Vagrant Figures (Yale, 2023?) on the 'origins' of police as a state technology. Makes the connection to race.

for GB the starting point should still be Beattie for 18th c law and justice. He just doesn't have the colonial angle.