johnpmcloughlin.bsky.social

View down a gravel garden path toward hedges and trees in autumn gold, set off by dark storm clouds beyond.

If transitory things, which soon decay,
Age must be loveliest at the latest day.
(Donne, ‘The Autumnal’)

Minority representation on TV causes outrage

From the new Private Eye, in shops now.

"Britain used to administer an empire from a company building around Downing Street in the 1820s,” the Reform MP for East Wiltshire said during a press conference, arguing that in the past the number of staff needed to run departments was far fewer than today."

If the model here is that you let a private company conquer a country, co-opt local elites to exploit it for profit and govern it by force, while providing no public services and never worrying about elections, then, yes - this is a really good analogy, Mr Kruger.

My Dad used to show me the constellations, but I don’t remember them, apart from the Plough and the North Star

Need something like this for next time I’m in Mayo

📷 Traditional Architecture in #Jeddah, Arabia, c. 1910 #Architecture

Took a while but nice to get my author’s copy!

#earlymodern ads are never boring!

An ox on the way to slaughter ran into a house... created a mess! Good on you Mr Ox! 🐂 🩲👖👗🧦🪟

St James's evening Post, May 6, 1729.

Great new exbo at my place of work #LSBU on community activism in SE1 in 1970s @se1.news. Free to all so come along to Borough Road Gallery at 103 Borough Road, SE1 0EH 😊. #localhistory @chppc.bsky.social

We have just joined BlueSky! Since our foundation in 1880, we have reproduced an unrivalled selection of historic maps, plans and views of London. We also publish books and monographs containing original research. See more of what we have to offer at: londontopsoc.org

I have discovered that women are more than capable of undertaking any task which requires physical strength or of learning any discipline which requires discernment and intelligence. Books which say otherwise were definitely not written by women.

- Christine de Pizan, b. 1365

The advice I give young people on choice of degree programme. Choose something you love. You’ve got the rest of your life to be frustrated and miserable.

About to teach the first class for our wonderful MSc in English Local History at @oxlifelonglearning.bsky.social - including a discussion of some of my favourite local history sources, like this 1586 map of the Isle of Purbeck.

Wisdom, moral imagination, an enlarged sympathy for those who live or have lived differently from yourself. This is what you get from studying the Humanities. So quite important, actually.

Excellent letter from the Bishop of Birmingham to Robert Jenrick.

At a time when so many other voices have been silent, the bishops have been admirably outspoken against attempts to stir up division.

The churches do a lot of community cohesion work & do not want to see this trashed for party gain.

I'm guessing Robert Jenrick might be hard-pressed to see a black face if he walked round his own constituency of Newark for 90 minutes, given the ethnic minority population of its main town looks to be smaller than the white population of Handsworth. (Source: citypopulation.de/en/uk/eastmi...)

it's ridiculous how some people seem to think the only possible reason to do a humanities phd is to become a tenured professor. i use the considerable fruits of my philological training all day every single day to overanalyse every word anyone says to or around me within an inch of its life

When I heard the news this morning I made virtually this same comment to my husband! If we women are good enough for the risen Christ himself…

We too are very excited for the publication of the latest #OpenAccess book in our #NewHistoricalPerspectives series, Atlantic Isles by @grod.bsky.social!

Published with the @ihr.bsky.social and @royalhistsoc.org with funding from @jisc.bsky.social.

Read more:
uolpress.co.uk/book/atlanti...

HMC gives warm welcome to new Principal, Beth Breeze

📢 Today we welcome our new Principal, @breezephilanthropy.bsky.social, to HMC. Beth joins us from @kent.ac.uk, where she was Professor of Philanthropic Studies and the founding Director of the Centre for Philanthropy. See full story 👇 tinyurl.com/5622usr5

Picture from Greenwich park, you see early onset colours of autism in the threes, a very warm light of the later afternoon suns, and a rainbow above the scenery to finish it off.

Golden hour, autumn bursting through, and a rainbow. Doesn’t get much better than that, does it?

Absolutely unacceptable behaviour from a publisher. Gross.

Linguistics.

Pale brown pottery bowl, size of a bowler hat, slightly uneven, with a wide lip around the top. In a glass display case.

5000 years ago, someone carefully made this bowl, put some food inside it and placed it in a stone-lined tomb, in a glen in Argyll.

And I wonder, was it to sustain the dead? Or to appease them? Or for some other now-unknowable, now unreachable reason?

(📷 mine, Kilmartin Museum).

Events Stay up to date with the upcoming events organised or hosted by the Institute of Historical Research

History curious? You don't need to be in London (or the UK) to attend many Institute of Historical Research seminars, although if you're in Bloomsbury you'll enjoy doing so. Most are hybrid (online/in person). They're free, usually fortnightly and open to the public.

Starting this week:

Thomas Pierce, Philallelia, or, The Grand Characteristick Whereby a Man may be Known to be Christ’s Disciple (1658) Today’s featured book has three contemporary owners’ signatures crammed onto the upper fifth of its title page, Edward Wilmot and the signature of “Lady Bellamount,” which is bifurcated by the sign…

Today on the blog: @franceswolfreston.bsky.social discusses several women who may be the Lady Bellamount who signed this book, each one fascinating earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com/2025/09/17/p... #HerBook #EarlyModern

Fascinating by @janelydon.bsky.social Shows how plans, early 1830s, on slave emancipation, by Henry George Grey, used principles of land commodification, to ‘create new forms of coercion’ to compel forced labour. In long term highly influential.

Day 259: Autumn is here, which is a mixed bag for me, but one of the big positives is pumpkin soup

Boundaries aren't always neat, straight lines. This is the border between the ecclesiastical parishes of Tynemouth & Earsdon, Northumberland showing the countless detached portions of hamlets and townships. It must have been difficult for the inhabitants to know where they actually lived! #MapMonday

London Soho, 1955. I post photographs taken by me since 1954. 180 unique historic street scenes of the UK and Ireland are included in my book "Forgotten Times" to be published this month. A limited number available to pre-order from Amberley Publishing. #London #Soho

Screenshot of the first page of Hilary Taylor, 'The gendered dynamics of violence in English apprenticeship: apprentices’ petitions to the Middlesex and Westminster Sessions, c. 1690–1830' Abstract: This article offers the first systematic analysis of the role that violence played in the management of apprentices, and the gendered dynamics of violence in English apprenticeship more broadly. It does so through an examination of 195 petitions that apprentices or their supporters submitted to the Middlesex and Westminster Sessions, which sought the cancellation of their indentures on grounds of ‘immoderate correction’. It offers a quantitative overview of the surviving petitions, examining the proportion that featured allegations of violence, the terms and level of detail in which violence was described, and its relationship to apprentices’ other stated grievances. It moves on to reconstruct the factors that could prompt masters and mistresses to mete out correction (as well as their commentaries on their perceived right to do so) and the tactics that petitioners used in crafting their complaints to legal authorities. Although female apprentices complained about violence at a disproportionate rate to their male peers, the material considered here suggests that their petitions did so in comparatively formulaic and restricted terms. The final section considers what implications this might have for our understandings of violence, gender and apprenticeship, and a genre of document – the petition – that provides access to these issues.

What can petitions to magistrates from London apprentices tell us about gendered violence in #EarlyModern England?

New addition from Hilary Taylor to the #PowerOfPetitioning annotated bibliography:
petitioning.history.ac.uk/2019/05/13/p...