Dr Fern Riddell

oooh this is brilliant!! thank you!!

FOA: Drinks Historians:

Can anyone help me find an image of a 'Swiss Green Absinthe' bottle c.1800-1820?

actual object or illustration - either would be brilliant

[claws own face in research hell]

A poor Labour canvasser came to my door in London last night and I told her as much. At length. Hopefully something, somewhere gets through to them.

Cover of book with text in yellow reading: The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires, overlaid on an image of an angel in seventeenth-century dress with wings and a long gun.

Hello Bluesky! My new book, THE FIREARM REVOLUTION, is out on 14 April. It’s about how a new technology changed society, and how hard it was to control. Here’s a little thread of what’s inside:

Yes, theatre majors do very well in business fields. Yes, women’s studies prepares those who take their classes for a complex world. Yes, English majors are highly adaptable to many careers. Yes, history provides excellent research skills

But our fields are not just about transferable skills.

There’s a lot of talk (rightly so) today about courses in high demand being marginalized/downplayed/cancelled, that the humanities in particular are very “cheap” & high ROI comparatively.

I do want remind us that justifying “what matters” via revenue generation is what got us here in the 1st place.

hate this in general but also what is Labour doing to reopen women's shelters? what is Labour doing to make sure conviction rates for rapes start going up again? what is Labour doing to make sure women feel they can trust the police? what is Labour doing to stop sexual harassers?

Reminder that the British far right is led by men who are terrified of women and are desperate to control them

Reform UK's Danny Kruger On Preparing For Government And Making 'A Mess Of It' Ex-Tory MP Danny Kruger reveals to Sienna Rodgers his plans as Reform UK’s head of preparing for government, from election readiness to pronatalist...

Fascinating interview by @siennamarla with Reform UK's Danny Kruger - who (among other things) tells her political parties have a "limited but important" role in undoing the sexual revolution and UK is suffering from a "totally unregulated sexual economy".

www.politicshome.com/news/article...

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm - Nature Among users initially on a chronological feed, 7 weeks of exposure to X’s algorithmic feed in 2023 shifted political attitudes and account-following behaviour in a more conservative direction compared...

Brainwashing, 2026 edition. This paper shows how X's algorithmic feed shifts people's views rightwards. It's a sophisticated, highly effective form of reorientation. And it is utterly chilling.
If you're still on that platform, unhook yourself now.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Unalive" "grape" "seggs" This has got to stop. Do people hear themselves? Its like talking to a particularly sensitive toddler. We can't remove serious words from our language just because we're afraid some fickle algorithm will show our posts to less people

How far back in time can you understand English? An experiment in language change

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle.

It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get.

www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

This is such a good thread, and this was where I had to tap out

Written English has barely changed in 300 years. If you can read Harry Potter, you can read Robinson Crusoe (1719).

"He wasn't actually arrested for--" WE KNOW. THEY ARE NEVER ARRESTED FOR SEX CRIMES. Society dngaf about protecting women, and women know that. We're just happy he was arrested at all

just to be clear there is SO MUCH precedent for arresting a senior royal. just not any precedent where it ends well for them

I only wish Virginia Giuffre could see this. I wish she had gotten justice in her lifetime instead of repeatedly being punished for seeking it.

But, 20 years later, Ernest was accused by The Times yet another possible murder.

This time Lord Graves, one his Lords of the Bedchamber, had been found in his rooms with HIS throat slashed, just like Sellis.

That Ernest had reportedly taken Graves’s wife as a mistress, was ofc unimportant…

…that he had proof the Duke was the father of his sister, Princess Sophia’s, illegitimate child.

You might think the story ends there…

…his throat was slashed in a way Sellis would have been unable to do, given that he was left handed.

Press rumours flew around the country that the Duke had murdered him because either:

He was the Duke’s secret lover

He had uncovered the Duke’s love affair with another valet

OR

Historians’ Favourite Royal Cover Ups KLAXON:

When Prince Ernest, Duke of Cumberland (& Queen Victoria’s Uncle) was accused of murdering his valet, Joseph Sellis, in 1810, the inquest found the man committed suicide, even tho…

Oh, the grand old duke of york
He ██████████████████
He ██████████████████
And he ██████████████████

Turning up Les Mis in the car to maximum volume, whose with me

On his BIRTHDAY 10/10

Gender studies courses are shutting down across the US. The Epstein files reveal why | Joan Wallach Scott Texas A&M University is the latest school to end women’s and gender studies programs and teaching race. We know why

'Abolishing those programs and the lessons about gender they have taught, will, Trump and his acolytes hope, undermine our ability not just to condemn, but also to critically analyze the policies and practices they want to impose.'

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Headline: "Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot" by Jan Martindale Dec. 10 2025

we can kill them all if we just work together and ✨believe💫

There is a measles outbreak in London, which has been widely reported.

Vaccination rates are low.

And we have been warned that an outbreak could be large.

Some of the reasons are due to misinformation and disinformation. Thankfully the Government appears to be waking up.

A thread.

Showing this to my mum now that I’m 40

No-one seems to have noticed, but many of the core developments in the Mandelson/Epstein story these last few days have been broken on this website. @pickardje.bsky.social and @petergeoghegan.bsky.social are both posting each breaking development on BlueSky, not X.

I always rather enjoy how Emerald Fennell clearly gives zero fucks about how other people think she should make films, and instead leans into going completely hatstand off the rails with her vision. All power to her, seriously.