Laura Kelly

Please consider emailing your government’s department of foreign affairs to demand the release of activists aboard the Freedom Flotilla Coalition ships.

🇮🇪 Irish friends: it takes two mins to email Tánaiste/Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Simon Harris at Simon.harris@oireachtas.ie

Greta Thunberg speaks to the press after being released from illegal detainment in Israel: "I could talk for a very, very long time about our mistreatment and abuses in our imprisonment. Trust me, but that is not the story.”

Even back in the 70s and 80s when I could be hassled by the police for walking while trans, no one ever tried to stop me pissing in the Ladies or tried to make me change into my swimsuit among men.

There is no dignity or respect involved in taking away rights I have exercised freely for forty years

The emblem of modern Ireland? Not fiddles and Guinness but a soulless shopping plaza | Emer McHugh The singer CMAT dances around a retail centre in a video for her new album. It is the elegy those of us who grew up in the post-Celtic tiger recession have been craving, says Irish writer Emer McHugh

me on @cmatbaby.bsky.social’s EURO-COUNTRY and why it gives voice to a distressingly normalised post-recession malaise. i hope you read!

Great piece, Emer!

Such an important piece. Thank you, @larafreidenfelds.bsky.social.

Miscarriage is a Crime Again In 1650, a young, single English servant named Anne Greene miscarried into the privy and did not tell anyone. We know her story because she was arrested for infanticide, convicted despite exonerati…

This week @larafreidenfelds.bsky.social argues that in a post Roe vs Wade world “Women who lose pregnancies, even before viability, are targeted in ways that strongly resemble early modern infanticide investigations.” nursingclio.org/2025/08/20/m...

I have a new article in Modern Italy on mothers, children in 1970s Italian feminist magazine Effe - a lot familiar in their discussions of emotions, expectations and experience of mothering although I especially like their ideas about the radical potential of maternal love

doi.org/10.1017/mit....

Nothing made slavery’s toxicity more obvious to Union troops than its effect on the fundamental unit of society, the family. For one thing, slave sales separated families. In the Upper South, where many Union soldiers were stationed in 1861, about one in three first marriages was broken by sale, and about half of all slave children were separated from at least one parent. 129 With their own eyes, soldiers saw slavery snap bonds between parents and children. The men of the Seventh Wisconsin were awakened by gunshots one November night. The following day, soldiers “learned, and saw the cause of the alarm in the form of two negro women—a mother and a daughter.” The pair had fled to Union lines to avoid the proposed sale of the “goodlooking” daughter into the so-called fancy trade, which soldiers viewed as a form of concubinage. Outraged by the plight and moved by the vulnerability of the mother and daughter, “every private in the ranks” cursed “that system which tramples on the honor of man, and makes merchandise of the virtue of women,” according to one member of the regiment. 130 When an Iowan encountered a young child about to be sold by her own father, who was also her master, he vowed, “By G–d I’ll fight till hell freezes over and then I’ll cut the ice and fight on.” 131

from chandra manning's wonderful book "what this cruel war was over"

much easier to understand the sheer bloody intensity of the civil war when you have a good grasp on just how terrible slavery was.

If you want to put back statues and memorials and names of Confederate traitors while tearing down museum exhibitions on slavery because they don't show the greatness of the nation... the nation whose history you're celebrating is whiteness. The kind of nationalist you are is a white nationalist.

Registration now open for WHS conference.

For the programme and details on how to register see below. ⬇️

The purpose of academic freedom is not to allow faculty to live cushy lives free from criticism or constraint. Its purpose is to allow them to investigate widely and report (or criticize) the results openly, instead of allowing politicians to decide what is true and what is not.

Do Less Harm Ethical Questions for Health Historians

Today is official publication day of @cethompson.bsky.social and my little collection “Do Less Harm: Ethical Questions for Health Historians”. It has 28 essays on names, images, museum and archival practices, teaching, reparations, positionality, citation and more. www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

Look forward to reading this too! Thanks for the thread, Evan.

Police arrest 474 people at protest over Palestine Action ban in London Number of arrests was highest recorded in relation to single operation in at least past decade, according to Met police

This is a disgrace. People have the right to protest against genocide.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

For international cat day, some cats from The Adamson Collection, composed of work created in the art therapy studio at Netherne Hospital in Surrey by individuals who were compelled to live there during the midC20th

Visitors stage anti-migrant march in Galway Galway city centre was especially busy last Saturday, with racegoers, summer tourists and the unusual addition of a march by far-right agitators, met by an anti-fascist counter demonstration, causing ...

Brilliant reporting by the galway advertiser. Absolutely perfect www.advertiser.ie/galway/artic...

I've emailed, Lindsey. I'm so sorry this is happening to you, it's absolutely shocking and I can't imagine the stress you must be under. I hope you get home soon.

Please consider emailing...

public.enquiries@homeoffice.gov.uk

...to make someone in the UK govt. listen, and help get my stranded wife back from the USA, and back under the ongoing medical care she needs.

Reposts hugely appreciated too. Thank you. x

Authors, if you feel safely able to, please consider signing this open letter to the Polari Prize

I think there should be more press about this popular medical historian, author @drlindseyfitz.bsky.social & dual USA-UK citizen’s case.
She needs to be in the UK for cancer treatment, yet is not allowed to leave US.

Lindsey, this is awful! I’m so sorry. I hope it gets resolved soon, it’s absolutely terrible.

People need to stop imagining that eugenics is just about Nazis, Hitler and Nazi Germany. Eugenics was born in the UK, and rapidly imported to the US, where both positive and negative eugenics made rapid inroads into law and policy on disability, medicine, marriage, immigration and more.

Akhras, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, lost his home to an Israeli strike, in early 2024. He and his family have been displaced multiple times, living in tents where the canvas sweats from too many bodies pressed into too little space. He no longer sits in a white-walled office or wears a badge. But he continues to work, seeing some fifty patients a day, most of them children. One of his regular patients is a young girl, no older than fourteen, who survived a strike that killed her entire family. She woke up in an I.C.U., alone, unable to understand where everyone had gone. Now she sits in front of Akhras in silence, until she asks, again and again, if he can bring them back. He has no answer, only a pencil stub and a coloring book, which he hopes she can use to express and process her emotions.

Read this passage, please, about trying to provide therapy for trauma in Gaza, even though it should make you feel like you are stabbing needles into your eyes.

www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

👀

Speaking on Fascism in Ireland during the 1920s & 1930s, Friday August 1st, Shankill Road Library, Belfast, 12pm.

When the Right Tried to Cancel the Turtles In the 1980s and '90s, successive moral panics about hooliganism and violence on TV culminated in a right-wing campaign against a dangerous social phenomenon: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Have seen a few mentions on here lately about the 1980s ninja panic in the UK, so am reposting my piece about how this led to the BBC broadcasting the Teenage Mutant HERO Turtles in 1990

tribunemag.co.uk/2021/04/when...

The Childers Professorship of Irish History at University of Cambridge An opportunity for an academic position as a The Childers Professorship of Irish History is available, as advertised on jobs.ac.uk. Apply now and explore other academic job openings.

The Childers Professorship of Irish History
University of Cambridge - Faculty of History #skystorians 🗃️www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOC329/t...