Fraser Raeburn

(don't mind me, I have two left ears and an ingrained jealousy towards anyone who can dance)

Look, are opera and ballet pulling in the huge crowds? No. Is it affordable to attend? No. Is it accessible and easy to get into as a newcomer to the genres? No.

But is it *entertaining*? Not really, no.

Call for Papers for "Ninety Years Since the Spanish Civil War: Experiences, Memories, Concepts (1936–2026)" Conference, Swiss Social Archives, Zurich, 19–20 November 2026.

Call for Papers for "Ninety Years Since the Spanish Civil War: Experiences, Memories, Concepts (1936–2026)" Conference, Swiss Social Archives, Zurich, 19–20 November 2026. Page two, including key themes: Possible topics include but are not limited to: • Conceptual (re)considerations: “Spanish Civil War” versus “Guerre d’Espagne” • Conservative entanglements and networks of support or aid • The war as a training ground for fascist and anti-fascist forces prior to the Second World War • Politics, public debate, taboos, and commemoration in post-war Switzerland • Politics, public debate, taboos, and commemoration in post-war Europe and beyond • The war in the arts and popular culture

CfP from the Swiss Social Archives in Zurich for the 90th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War's outbreak - an especial focus on the conflict's legacy and memory, and its place within wider histories. Looks great!

Today marks 1 year since the first Ask Me Anything (AMA) for AskHistorians in our push to very actively recruit guests, and where are we now? Today is the 90th AMA in that effort, helping us cross the thresholds of 35k upvotes, 8k comments, and 15k link shares in that year (and ~10m views)!

Taking some dark solace in that the Secretary of Defence has clearly been distracted all week by his staff with culture war and AI nonsense like a baby with car keys so that he had no time to meddle with actual operational planning.

My petty gripes with the use of 'forgotten' as a framing device continues. While Katharine Atholl and Eoin O'Duffy might not be read as often as Orwell, there is no universe in which their writing on the SCW can be regarded as 'forgotten' or even 'neglected'...

I for one look forward to Labour learning literally any other lesson than 'people want to vote for progressive candidates who do progressive things'.

My phone is trying to condition me into thinking that capitalism makes me more popular and likeable by sending me a notification each time I make a purchase.

Utterly shocked that curling of all sports has fallen into disrepute. Such a raw, primal contest, played against the extremes of nature as much as other competitors. The kind of arena where you'd expect participants to prioritise honour and solidarity against the elements over tawdry medals.

Munich Security Conference live: Russia poisoned Navalny using frog toxin, five European nations say ‘Only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin to target Navalny,’ UK, France, Germany, Sweden and Netherlands say

I for one trust the French to identify frog toxins

www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

Everything else notwithstanding, huge respect to the photographer who made him look like a cheap Bond villain here.

📢Call For Papers📢
Sociability & Political life

Marc Jaffré & I are organising a conference! We're asking: can there be politics without sociability? How have friendship, intimacy, socialising & informal attachments been central to political projects & movements?

Get your abstracts in by Feb 14th!

We now know that no far right personality actually believes in the prospect of sharia law being enforced on western societies, because if they did they'd already be queuing up to bootlick and pre-enrol for the regime militias.

Subreddit activity rankings, showing that r/AskHistorians has finally triumphed over r/Conservative, with r/confession as collateral damage.

Look everyone we did it!

Not even a complaint at this point; the supply vs demand issue means that nitpicking is the only way to decide between fundable proposals.

Happy rejection from EU grants for arbitrary subjective reasons day to those who celebrate.

English fast bowlers of the 1990s

I know it's misanthropic of me but I always hope that those "1 like = 1 thing" posts never get any likes.

One of these platforms has been home to a decade-long project to bring curated, high-quality and in-depth public history content into people's feeds every day.

Just saying.

I am absolutely torn between being very happy at this level of site traffic for our project, and a keen need to move on up out of this immediate neighbourhood.

Academics vying for a spot in Epstein‘s world. There are so many. I feel the need to make a thread, so I don’t keep confusing them. 1/

They looked to historical fascisms and saw the uniforms and violence and rhetoric and assumed that was all they needed, because that's the stuff they found cool.

Like other fascists, they look to the past as a source of aesthetics, not realities.

Instead, they're running into the reality that they haven't done the groundwork these regimes did to delegitimise and dehumanise their domestic and foreign enemies, to make collective dissent impossible - the work needed to make performative violence the final, crowning act rather than the first.

What we're seeing is an assumption by American fascists that all they need to turn up and be muscular, to perform the cruelties that will force America to resemble their dreams and it will all just unfold naturally from there.

They assumed their enemies would be cowed, and bystanders admiring.

These regimes never felt strong enough to ignore public opinion, disregard mass protest and seek confrontations with enemies they couldn't isolate and overwhelm. They did a lot of work instead to rewrite the terms of civil society, to limit space for collective association not tied to the regime.

That is, the Trump regime does not behave like Mussolini's or Hitler's not because of aversion (necessarily), but rather because they're emulating the propagandised, mythical version of how those states worked.

Something I've been ruminating on watching the news from Minnesota unfold is the extent to which fascism - being an ideology concerned with recreating and reliving an imagined, mythical past - now naturally includes reliving an imagined *fascist* past.

You should read everything @adamserwer.bsky.social writes, but this one really stands out. He's given a gift link below.

I'm shocked, shocked to find a disconnect between administrators and classroom realities going on in this establishment.

The very first tutorials I taught as a PhD student included the Friday, 5-6pm slot. By the last week, only one student was attending. We had a great chat, but I'm unconvinced that the cohort's pedagogical needs were being well served.