Sam Grinsell

Environmental History Today webinar series for Early Career Scholars eseh.org/envhistoday-...

Attention creative medievalists! Eleanor Barraclough & I are co-editing a special issue of Public Humanities entitled CREATING THE MEDIEVAL NOW! See the cfp for details: essays of 2,000-3,000 words due 1 May 2026. (Amazing artwork by @hellomizk.bsky.social). 1/ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

samgrinsell.hcommons.org/2025/12/02/h... yesterday I started a series about something that's bothered me for a long time: how we connect and history's place within that #history #sts #culture #politics #BrunoLatour

Very pleased that my piece 'Urban history as urgent work, an argument for disciplinary promiscuity' has been published in @urbanhistory.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S096...
Many thanks to @mctom.bsky.social for organising the roundtable that got these thoughts going back in 2023! #UrbanHist #EnvHums

Labour Health Secretary: am I out of touch? No no, it's the diagnoses that are wrong!

Then I have a question about the thread so far: you mentioned and then swiftly moved on from curry sauce. Wouldn't this come from, or at least be popularised by, the German currywurst?

Today's thread you didn't know you needed

As an aside, and slightly off piste, nobody really knows what this Belgian stuff is. Defied even a few analytical chemists I know.

YouTube video by NoBSClips The Simpsons - Monster Island

youtu.be/uAS3DsmLfKY?... I reckon they focused on the word dictator and came up with something like this

No that's absolutely right. We talk about the long 2020 but in many ways a lot of things were sort of clear from (at least) 2016

Aye, it takes an awful lot to improve the world somewhat as it turns out

Absolutely that. Also as regards my personal development

Me at 26: we should improve society somewhat

Me at 46: we should confiscate the possessions of all billionaires and imprison them where appropriate. That’s step 1.

(The latter position is, obviously, a sensible take on some things but it's a wildly dangerous thing to build into a worldview because then boom Trump, Putin and Orban exist ourside of your entire vision of the world)

People who lived through two world wars: there is great good and great evil in this world and you need to learn the differences

People who benefitted from the postwar boom: you know I think everyone means well in the end, who are we to say who's evil and who's not?

Learning about politics in the early 00s: things are complex and there are rival positions on all issues

Living adult life: everyone who seems like an utter baddy is a baddy and will strip you and your friends of their rights while smug people pretend this is a complex issue with rival positions

Opposition to fascism now to be spearheaded by the Woodcraft Folk, the writers are once again phoning this in

A quick thread about empire based on a long conversation in a hospital waiting room today. Like so many Brits, my family includes people from multiple heritages, including white elders raised in industrialised regions of North England and Wales which were not racially diverse when they were young.

a historian is someone for whom historiography is harder than it is for other people, to misquote Thomas Mann

Anyone writing history without a methodological training in the subject struggles with one aspect: historiography.
It’s our core toolkit. It defines every story we tell.
Let’s nurture it.

UK Supreme Court: You're allowed to discriminate against trans people, but you don't have to

cis people: "well, our hands are tied"

it’s a government packed to the absolute gills with people who hold transphobia as an acceptable (in fact desirable) bigotry among their social circle

Well, the ruling and the vast resources marshalled by the leaders of the anti-trans movement. But the ruling can be easily and directly countered by the government

Think this is all the info I need to do it for him. Just hand over all the digitised words in the world and several billion pounds and I'll get right on it

Winter sunlight floods a wide rural scene, seen through the bare, arching branches of two foreground trees. Rolling hills, hedgerows, and reflective lowland fields glow in the distance under a hazy sky. A blackbird descends into a hedge in the middle of the frame.

Somehow managed to get a dive-bombing blackbird in the middle of this picture

Essential that the government clarify the law to make clear that people can live as their gender, irrespective of their gender at birth, and that this right is protected in law. The misguided Supreme Court ruling is driving trans people out of ordinary life

And the WI was inclusive throughout all of that, albeit unofficial between 1970 and 2015...

yes, I meant about society — this article feels well grounded, wise given the connections with the rupture/teacher of grief

'We need struggle that is meaningful. We need dependency that is mutual. We need uncertainty we can sit with. We need friction that shapes us.'

feeling all of this 🎯💯

anyway we should all become anarchists but if you really want to do electoralism, the greens are right there.

*Of course infinite growth on a finite planet is not sustainable but actual degrowth economics is hard and arguably not developed yet, getting failed growth politics is not a substitute