Matt Houlbrook

#20s30s

Current exhibition | LSE Library Find out about our current exhibition drawing on themes within our collections.

NEW EXHIBITION NOW OPEN ✨
The Women’s Library at 100: Celebrating a Century of Collections.
Join us Thu 12 March to celebrate - meet the curators alongside colleagues from other archives including @nationalarchives.gov.uk.web.brid.gy @thelondonarchives.bsky.social
www.lse.ac.uk/library/twl100

'It takes more then a piece of paper to make someone British' well yes it does. It takes years and years, lengthty piss taking application forms, a test, qualifications, employment and £££££££. What did Goodwin do other than be born here?

Companies after Pride Month is over

Who have you been talking to? Wonder if it’s worth thinking about how to bring a bit more pressure to bear…

Some disappointing institutions close to home still posting on X …

This looks great …

This image is a painting titled Launching the Lifeboat, created in 1881 by the British artist Robert Ernest Roe. The scene depicts a dramatic sea rescue during a storm on the North Yorkshire coast, at Scarborough. It shows a lifeboat being launched by a crowd of people into rough, crashing waves to assist a sailing vessel in distress nearby. The painting captures the intense atmosphere of Victorian-era coastal rescue attempt.

Launching the Lifeboat Robert Ernest Roe (1851–1930) Scarborough Art Gallery. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution formed OTD in 1824 was to be a universal service where "the subjects of all nations be equally objects of the Institution, as well in war as in peace” a mission it follows still.

Strangely this post brought a few people to mind straight away...

I’ve always thought that you can get worryingly far in academia by parroting other people’s work and deploying terminology tactically, and I genuinely believe people who think they can delegate their academic work to LLMs are these same people.

A black holding cover for the book 'Star Wars: Star Pilots' by Chris Kempshall

Wedge Antilles from the Star Wars franchise piloting a snowspeeder in The Empire Strikes Back

‘I have never wanted to suggest that my wartime experiences were any more important or heroic than any other pilot. But so many of them are gone now and I am still here. Their words deserve to be heard’ - Wedge Antilles

'Star Wars: Star Pilots' Oct 2026 (DK) geni.us/StarWarsStar...

Holding up a copy of a book, Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains by John Grindrod, in front of two suburban semis and a speed bump

Wouldn't you LOVE to have me on your podcast/radio show/other modern communications thingy? Tales of the Suburbs is out next week, and it would be smashing to get word out as far as possible over the next few months via the medium of chat. Slide into my DMs or www.johngrindrod.co.uk/contact x

If a blow-by-blow boxing write-up in an 1889 English newspaper quotes an English audience member yelling "---- you!", can we assume it is fuck? I mean, it's fuck, right? It could be damn you, I guess? Can a Victorian language expert weigh in? I've spent too long reading Steven Knight scripts.

I'm really pleased to see 'Finding and leaving traces: Prehabitation and the presence of the past in the Victorian-era prison' - co-written with Dominique Moran and Jennifer Turner - is now out in @jofhistgeog.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1016/j.jh...

#20s30s always here for some good Cottingley Fairies content...

They need to invest in a hosepipe instead.

Buckets? No call for them. Old-fashioned.

www.youtube.com/shorts/1RoTD...

I can still remember the *smell* of the WH Smiths on Scunthorpe precinct in the 1980s - let alone my excitement on going there.

"Foreign-born Citizens" are actually just called citizens.

"Foreign-born voters" are just called voters

"non-citizen voters" (yes, this is a thing here in 🇬🇧) are just voters.

Show me AI that can visit an archive, then sit in the searchroom and interpret 19th-century handwriting, and you might - almost - have a point. I'm seeing an awful lot of evidence that people just don't know what humanities scholars actually do.

Every one of these ****s consciously chose to move to a society that runs on slave-labour.

Some of them will claim to be oblivious to that.

That makes them wicked AND stupid.

"We called London a war zone and moved to Dubai by mistake"

They huffed and they puffed and they blew their house down.

I've got a tip for the PM that's going to blow his mind. If he thinks about the documents he puts his name to, he'll have to spend less time distancing himself from them.

Burnt their house down by telling all the bricks they are unnecessary extremist losers.

And yeah, I know that’s an awful sentence but it’s still early and I’ve not finished my first cup of tea.

The oral histories of Palestinians who survived the slaughter by the Yishuv has borne witness to this bloodshed for decades, and the archival material now catches up.

It's not hard to see what's happening here. Labour has been desperately courting voters who switched to Reform years ago and are never coming back, while repeatedly dissing and dismissing its own voters and the things they care about. A plausible alternative emerges, and down the ship goes.

This is nothing. Just send Mahmood out again to announce some more anti-refugee policies and you can easily find your way to fifth place.

This sounds great! Definitely one for fans of #ArtDeco

Kathryn will also be giving a talk at the Isokon Gallery on 30 April. Follow us on www.eventbrite.com/o/10598755560 for alerts when tickets go on sale.

Brits: Please scream. This is a Labour govt proposing to hand the property of individual British workers to largely US corporations.

@davidpintod.bsky.social