@drfernriddell.bsky.social
Historian. Author. On your TV/Radio. **Victoria’s Secret: The Private Passion of a Queen OUT NOW** Expert: Suffragette Terrorism, Music Hall, 19thC Sex + Culture, Queen Victoria & John Brown. www.fernriddell.com https://lnk.to/victoriassecretbook
The hack of the British Library, from which it has still not fully recovered, should have been a warning that we cannot rely on digital books alone, but that would require the people making decisions on these topics to be even mildly informed on the subject.
Biker Mice From Mars (the ORIGINAL series)
An 'epidemic' of violence: The women and girls killed by men last year
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Congratulations to the marvellous Dr Fern Riddell and Dr Emily Hauser on their new paperbacks, out today!
Both books reframe what we know about famous women from history & myth
Tbh I can really see Kier Starmer pulling this off.
Media: Incredible photo of Elton John and his family, to be hung in the National Gallery
Authors: desperately trying to find a high res version, to see if their book is on his shelves
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Any authors or image creators who haven't registered their latest work with ALCS need to do so asap. The next payment is being processed and you really don't want to miss out.
Napoleonic Historians to the front pls
I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.
Thank you!
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.
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
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...
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
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