James Fisher

Front cover of Violent Waters: Environmental Politics in Early Modern England by Elly Robson Dezateux.

Blurb of Violent Waters: How were environments and politics remade by sovereigns, floods, mapmakers, migrants, rioters, and writers during wetland improvement projects in early modern England? Violent Waters examines flagship ventures which promised to transform unruly fenland fringes into orderly terrain at the heart of national power and productivity. In practice, these projects sparked constitutional controversy, new floods, and huge riots. The first state-led project in Hatfield Level brought local, national, and transnational interests into contact and conflict for almost a century. Elly Robson Dezateux traces the environmental politics that emerged as water and land were constructed and contested, both mentally and materially. These disputes pivoted on urgent questions about risk and justice, which became entangled in civil war conflict and exposed the limits of central authority and technology. Ultimately, improvement was destabilised by a lack of legitimacy and the dynamism of local custom as a method of environmental management and collective action. Wetland communities, as much as improvers and sovereigns, remade the terrain of politics and the future of the fens.

Violent Waters: Environmental Politics in Early Modern England is out now with Cambridge University Press: www.cambridge.org/core/books/v...

This watery, riotous book has been more than a decade in the making, and I'm delighted to see it out in the world to live its own life!

Selling Education in England, 1650–1715* Abstract. In the period 1650–1715, a growing consensus emerged that educational culture in England did not meet the needs of the population, and that chang

My new article, 'Selling Education in England, 1650-1715' is now out (open access) in the English Historical Review! academic.oup.com/ehr/advance-...

If I understand correctly, it seems the claim is that a generic LLM is (surprisingly) better than specialist machine learning tools like Transkribus

Gemini 3 Solves Handwriting Recognition and it’s a Bitter Lesson Testing shows that Gemini 3 has effectively solved handwriting on English texts, one of the oldest problems in AI, achieving expert human levels of performance.

See also:

generativehistory.substack.com/p/gemini-3-s...

The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved

Impressive claims for Gemini 3.

Transcription is a potentially field-shifting use case of LLMs for historians.

Maybe some silver linings in the AI madness...

newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

Color illustration of a man of African Descent named Jack. He is wearing typical 18th century clothing, including breeches, a striped waistcoat, and a tan jacket. In front of Jack is a copy of a newspaper advertisement noting his escape.

How might we today visualize the appearance of people who fled enslavement? We asked a modern artist, Adrienne Mayor, to imagine and sketch Jack, who took flight from slavery in Virginia in 1730.

Read Billy Smith’s telling of Jack’s story: freedom-seekers.org/story/jack/

Really pleased to announce the launch of the all-new, all-dancing, London Lives website - www.londonlives.org It has been thoroughly re-engineered to facilitate more types of search, and redesigned for phones and tablets. The team very much hopes peope like it. 1/

So grateful to have received the Elise M. Boulding Prize from the Peace History Society for Pax Economica. What a tremendous honor!

@princetonupress.bsky.social

JOB
Assistant Professor in the History of Knowledge Pre-1400,
University of Cambridge

www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/assista...

Contested Commons

Formidably erudite, compellingly argued, and dryly humorous, Contested Commons will change the way you think about the politics of space, the "myth of the commons", and the history of England since the eighteenth century: MATTHEW KELLy, author of The Women Who Saved the English Countryside "Starting with Kennington Common, and ranging from Steeple Bumpstead to Sheffield, Stonehenge and Brixton, and with a cast that includes ramblers, ranters, revolutionaries and ravers, this is a superb, sweeping but fine-grained history. It's also a highly necessary, politically urgent reminder of what public space is - places for everyone, owned by everyone, accessible to everyone, whether carefully tended or wild - and what it isn't, the tradition of pseudo-public space that runs from Victorian parks to privatised malls.' OWEN HATHERLEY, author of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

A reminder that my book on the history of protest is now published. It is superbly produced with a great cover. Buy it now from @reaktionbooks.bsky.social

This is heart breaking. Such a wonderful and generous chess teacher, absolutely loved his videos.

Bound Labour, Narratives of Nationhood, and the Rhetoric of Slavery: Liberty, Identity, and Scottish Coal-Miners in the Long Eighteenth Century

Very much looking forward to Polly Lowe @polly-lowe.bsky.social speaking this Wednesday on bound labour and Scottish miners in the 18th c. @long18thsem.bsky.social @ihrlibrary.bsky.social Everyone welcome - either in person or hybrid, but please register at www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

The Experience of Work in Early Modern England Cambridge Core - Economic History - The Experience of Work in Early Modern England

Delighted to share that my first book The Experience of Work in Early Modern England (co-written with the fantastic @jwhittle.bsky.social, @markhailwood.bsky.social, and Hannah Robb) has been published and is available free and Open Access! doi.org/10.1017/9781...

#earlymodern #economic #history

What's in yer basement?

Again please Mark, but ruffle the pages more and read the title in a whispery voice

This book applies the innovative work-task approach to the history of work, which captures the contribution of all workers and types of work to the early modern economy. Drawing on tens of thousands of court depositions, the authors analyse the individual tasks that made up everyday work for women and men, shedding new light on the gender division of labour, and the ways in which time, space, age and marital status shaped sixteenth and seventeenth-century working life. Combining qualitative and quantitative analysis, the book deepens our understanding of the preindustrial economy, and calls for us to rethink not only who did what, but also the implications of these findings for major debates about structural change, the nature and extent of paid work, and what has been lost as well as gained over the past three centuries of economic development. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Cover of Whittle, Jane, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and Taylor Aucoin. The Experience of Work in Early Modern England. of Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Who did what in early modern England?

New #OpenAccess book, 'The Experience of Work in Early Modern England' by @jwhittle.bsky.social, @markhailwood.bsky.social, @hkrobb.bsky.social & @aucointaylor.bsky.social, based on thousands of #EarlyModern court depositions 🗃️

Read it: doi.org/10.1017/9781...

Great news!
JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month

www.jstor.org/action/showL...

Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer scratched bullets with a Helldivers combo and a furry sex meme The suspected shooter left a hodgepodge of extremely online taunts.

Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer scratched bullets with a Helldivers combo and a furry sex meme

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...

Cheers I'll check it out

A clarifying summary of different ways of thinking about AI and culture >

I hadn't come across the final 'role play' framing, which is very useful

Instead of regurgitating the bromide that LLMs are just "autocomplete on steroids" (even by people who know better), maybe we can actually engage in some public education. The problem with genAI is better expressed through a classic computer science concept, known as SYMBOL GROUNDING. 🧵

Yvette Cooper: Some 'don't know the full nature' of Palestine Action Defending the group's proscription under terror law, she said the organisation was "not a non-violent organisation".

It is inherently absurd to proscribe a group as terrorists based on acts the public doesn't know about. Terrorism *by definition* involves violence intended to intimidate a civilian population. How can the target population be terrorised by acts they know nothing about?

www.bbc.com/news/article...

I certainly share all the worries about students outsourcing their writing and thinking to generative AI models, but the core question for me is "Why do they see this as a good thing to do?" We have to meet the challenge of that question and the challenge dates back to long before ChatGPT showed up.

Of course its seductive, but partly illusory. Chatbots can mimic PhD-like text on almost every topic. But I don't know how you get around the problem that it requires expertise to distinguish between useful and nonsensical outputs

OpenAI claims new GPT-5 model boosts ChatGPT to ‘PhD level’ GPT-5's release comes as tech firms continue to compete in an effort to claim the world's most advanced AI.

The revealing phrase here is "feels like", because what matters is how the product feels to its user, not it's actual capabilities

"GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines: Introduction A free online humanities course about how to learn and work and thrive in an AI world.

I highly recommend this free online course on AI, which neatly distils the most pressing cultural concerns and generally strikes the right note in terms of critical engagement

thebullshitmachines.com

OpenAI Has Come for Education OpenAI's recent partnership with Instructure's Canvas Learning Management System furthers its aggressive entry into education. While claiming to support students and teachers, I'm worried about the ef...

"OpenAI has come for education on all fronts, through the students, through the teachers, through the institutions, through the government.... OpenAI is now presenting itself as the saviour of the problems that it caused in the first place."

leonfurze.com/2025/07/31/o...

Congrats Emily! Massive achievement.