James Fisher

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.

A photo of the author holding up a copy of her book, which has a red cover.

Delighted that the print copies of my first book 'Birth, Death, and Domestic Religion in early modern London', just published with @universitypress.cambridge.org, have arrived! 📚📚📚

I don't know what the psychological impact will be of reading and marking endless textual equivalents of "glossy but with 13 fingers" will be, but it can't be good

I’m staring at the sentence about using “generative AI to produce a historical image.”

What does the word “historical” mean in this sentence? Vibes?

New History Book Series Call for Proposals: Routledge Studies in Eighteenth- Century Cultures and Societies - BSECS Series Editors: Elaine Chalus, University of Liverpool, UK and Deborah Simonton, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark Routledge Editor: Max Novick The long eighteenth century sits as a pivotal poin...

***CALL FOR PROPOSALS***
Routledge Studies in #18thC Cultures & Societies (eds. @profelainechalus.bsky.social & Deborah Simonton) seeks proposals for book-length studies on aspects of British, European, or transnational culture and society c.1680-1850. Full details: www.bsecs.org.uk/news-and-eve...

All famines are man-made, all famines are political. Historians of empire and humanitarianism have known this forever. Gaza is not starving, Gaza is being starved, by Israel, and this starvation is enabled by our government and by every other government that does not step in to force food and aid.

Gaza health ministry says 33 people dead from malnutrition in last 48 hours New figures from the Hamas-run ministry include 12 children who have died, as the UN says Israel must allow aid into Gaza.

A tipping point has been reached.

Gaza is now starving to death in front of the whole world.

Those who facilitated and justified this abomination were given ample warning for 21 months.

You have no excuses, and nowhere to hide: you will be held to account for what you've done.

Initial Impressions of OpenAI's Agents: Unfinished, Unsuccessful, and Unsafe By 12 hours after the announcement I had seen OpenAI's promo video shared so many times on social media that I could recite the whole thing backwards. I am highly cynical of anything produced by a tec...

Want to see OpenAI’s newly hyped “Agent” in action? Prepare to be amazed at all the things it can’t actually do. #ArtificialIntelligence #AIEducation #AIEdu #AIInEd #AIInEdu #EduSky leonfurze.com/2025/07/19/i...

Absolutely dystopian juxtaposition from the Guardian front page. Difficult to understand how anyone of decency and conscience can defend this government at this point. Just sheer moral degeneracy to arm a state that does this and arrest people for objecting. Wtf are we doing as a country?

Opinion | I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. A scholar of genocide comes to a painful conclusion about Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” writes Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. “I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”

AI in the Writing Process: A Problem of Purpose When we value the product of writing more than the process, we’re bound to see students using GenAI to skip to the end. So, what are we going to do about it? #ArtificialIntelligence #AIEducation #AIEdu #AIInEd #AIInEdu #Writing #AIWriting

AI in the Writing Process: A Problem of Purpose

When we value the product of writing more than the process, we’re bound to see students using GenAI to skip to the end. So, what are we going to do about it? #ArtificialIntelligence #AIEducation #AIEdu #AIInEd #AIInEdu #Writing #AIWriting

A modern artist's illustration of what an 18th century Freedom Seeker named Jack might have looked like.

We can never know the lives, the beliefs, the hopes, and dreams of the enslaved people who dared to be free, but we can speculate, imagine, and research. If you've ever considered exploring these histories, Freedom Seekers is always accepting new submissions!
freedom-seekers.org/upload-your-...

Historians: We are having the wrong conversation about AI This might be the first in a series of posts exploring how historians can engage with AI tools.

Are we framing the AI discussion wrong in history departments? I think we're too focused on student “cheating” while missing the bigger picture. I've been thinking about this for a while and decided to write it down.

lucaspoy.substack.com/p/historians...

Front cover of book: title Farm Accounts in Rural Europe c.1700-1914

Contents page

First page of chapter 2 by James D Fisher titled Accounting for Labour on Capitalist Farms in Eighteenth-Century England

📖 I've got a new chapter out on accounting as a technique of labour management in C18th English capitalist agriculture

In this volume of Farm Accounts @boydellandbrewer.bsky.social >>

Smellmaxxer-in-chief

@willtullett.bsky.social

Front cover of book: title Farm Accounts in Rural Europe c.1700-1914

Contents page

First page of chapter 2 by James D Fisher titled Accounting for Labour on Capitalist Farms in Eighteenth-Century England

📖 I've got a new chapter out on accounting as a technique of labour management in C18th English capitalist agriculture

In this volume of Farm Accounts @boydellandbrewer.bsky.social >>