Susan Amussen
@sdamussen.bsky.social
Retired historian @UCMerced, early modern Britain and Atlantic world; gender, race and class. Old. Does not represent employer. What's in a name: How historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare (Manchester 2026)
🚨The Witch of Edmonton - recorded LIVE - has finally dropped on the podcast! The first of five plays recorded at the White Bear Theatre during our Wyrd Revels 2025 Next month: The Wise-woman of Hogston #drama #theatre #live #AudioDrama #dog #witch audioboom.com/posts/893327...
The Witch of Edmonton by Dekker, Ford and Rowley (LIVE Full Cast Audio Recording)
There's trouble in Edmonton...
audioboom.com
🎉 🥳 🏅 🎵 📜 🗃️ Chris Hoban and I are absolutely delighted that our collaboration has received an Honorary Mention as 'Cultural Knowledge Exchange Project of the Year' in the inaugural National Centre for Academic and Cultural Exchange (NCACE) Future Icons awards. 1/
I've been moaning about the lack of imagination in university leadership. This is one alternative. www.chronicle.com/article/what... “We can’t just be a smaller version of who we were before. That becomes a death spiral.”
What Can a Struggling University Do if It Can’t Cut Any More? Change.
Instead of continuing to shrink, Southern Oregon U. is trying to shift how it functions.
chronicle.com
the whole "women's sports exist to protect women from men" framing is hilarious, given that a lot of these divisions were initially formed because men were deeply embarrassed any time a woman beat them at a sport olympic shooting was mixed gender right up until a woman won the gold
*whispers* Plumbers have the right to be well-educated, too.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2w agoLinda McMahon says some elementary school students should be put on a "pathway" to become plumbers
'Defining questions for higher education are emerging at a time when universities are structurally under-resourced to answer them.' (page 19) Grim but important reading of the tea leaves.
New choices: Revisiting futures for higher education in England - HEPI
English universities face ‘unstable hybrid’ future as funding model collapses faster than predicted, warns new report. English higher education is heading into a future nobody planned, according to a ...
hepi.ac.uk
Leading a Great Fire of London walk on Saturday afternoon and there are still some tickets! Come join me!
Anna Cusack@annacusack.bsky.social · 4w agoI'm now running a series of historic walking tours in London via how-to-history.com/events/. Tickets are currently at a preview price while I trial them. So join me for a few hours to explore the City, its hidden gems, & the things I love. I've had great feedback so far; more is always welcome.
The Records of Early English Drama is delighted to announce the open access publication of the tenth digital edition in the REED series. The dramatic records for the Swan Playhouse, edited by Sally-Beth MacLean, are now available on REED Online (ereed.org/collections/...).
you should be entitled, as a taxpayer, to public employees who do their jobs according to the standards of their professions you are not entitled to public employees who share your views just because they happen to be your views relocating “trust” from competence to conformity is a fascist project
My short essay about two 17th century Powhatan women in London and Bermuda is finally out! commonplace.online/article/the-...
The Other Elizabeth and Mary: Anglo-Powhatan Marriages and the Virginia Company of London - Commonplace
By employing marriage as a technology of imperialism, the Virginia Company hoped to turn its struggling overseas colonies into stable, productive English communities.
commonplace.online
Happy that I participated in the edition of this special issue alongside with Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, @cchevale.bsky.social and Iliana Tintori Reyes !
C. Chevaleyre@cchevale.bsky.social · 2w agobrill.com/view/journal... A special issue of the e-journal of Portuguese history on slavery in early modern Asia. Edited by Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, @crayondebois.bsky.social and Iliana Tintori Reys from @iisg-amsterdam.bsky.social
I have just realized to my dismay that one of my footnotes switched references: two documents cited, but each given the other's description. This took about three hours of my time today to sort out, and because I also queried the archive, probably an archivist spent time puzzling on it too.
This is kind of an incredible website: Why your stuff stopped lasting, who profited, and what's still built right.
Worse on Purpose
The brands you trusted quietly gutted quality to protect margins. Investigative essays on corporate enshittification. Free newsletter.
worseonpurpose.com
Buying tickets to a Phillies game, which apparently now involves creating accounts for three separate websites (one of which required an email and a text passcode) and then downloading two new apps. It's so much fun!
I recently read some conservative women’s advice columns from the 40s and 50s. In one, the woman advises wives to visit children’s clothing stores for style ideas. Because men are attracted to children. That was the advice.
Scott Horton@robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 2w agoMark Zuckerberg's assistant at Meta, Josh Felker, who was responsible for Meta's "digital experiences for kids," was arrested after admitting he tried to sext a 13-year-old during an undercover sting. nypost.com/2026/07/20/u...
This has prompted a flood of archival photos, which is also a sort of 'who we are and what we do' survey of History at Exeter. Here's the Sheffield City Archives. #ArchiveHour 2/
Up next on MSNow. Good stuff here from @radiofreetom.bsky.social. Trump lost this war in the first days. He set huge goals and was unwilling to accepts the costs of achieving those goals. Iran that. And that was basically it. Everything since has been him trying to avoid that reality.
This is an incredibly important point: like all areas of local government (and the VCH was part of that, mostly a long time ago), access to local record offices is becoming restricted due to funding restraints. For us, that is especially problematic.
Susan Amussen@sdamussen.bsky.social · 2w agoAnother piece in the cuts of funding for the humanities is visible in local record offices. The Somerset Archives are only open 3 days a week; Norfolk only 4 days a week. As a US grad student doing research in the UK, that would have made it impossible to write my dissertation.
Another piece in the cuts of funding for the humanities is visible in local record offices. The Somerset Archives are only open 3 days a week; Norfolk only 4 days a week. As a US grad student doing research in the UK, that would have made it impossible to write my dissertation.
I’ll never forget the elderly Black lady explaining to a younger white woman how to cook the collard greens they had just received in the bag from the food pantry. She was pleased to have them, and delighted to be the teacher. (Yes, there was pork, and trust me, the collards were cooked.)
Kevin M. Kruse@kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 3w agoThe lesson here is that greens are simply healthier when they're made with pork.
Congratulations to the government on saving 2700 jobs by nationalising British Steel. Now, about the 18,000 university jobs lost in the last 18 months, with more coming…
Trying to figure out how both Steve Hilton and turning point USA have decided in the last few days that I would give them money. Not only won’t I, but my whole history of political contributions is somewhat different!
it’s amazing how often the solution to endlessly multiplying pedagogical problems turns out to be restoring an actual pedagogical relationship between instructors and students
Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa@benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 3w agoA really interesting piece on reducing AI cheating in the classroom from a Professor of English and former Dean of Humanities at University of Utah. The solutions? Smaller classes, lower teaching loads for faculty, and in-person classes.
‘Thousands of university job cuts in humanities and social sciences are creating widespread cold spots for languages, classics and theology degrees, the British Academy has warned’ www.theguardian.com/education/20...
Humanities among degrees being ‘extinguished’ by hard-up universities
Exclusive: Experts fear rise in education ‘cold spots’ and social immobility as 4,000 academic posts lost in one year
theguardian.com
To the inevitable cries of “just digitize everything, then;” not an answer. Making digital facsimiles accessible requires huge investment: staff, metadata, preservation. Orgs are currently not funded to meet these needs. While digital objects are great, they’ll never replace looking at originals.
Amalia S. Levi, PhD@amaliasl.bsky.social · 3w ago📢 Once more for the people in the back: - Most [more than 95%] of archives have not been digitized. - Most of humanity's knowledge and memory is *not* reachable by LLMs. - Believing that AI can provid you with comprehensive, definitive, "intelligent" results is folly.
As someone who has regularly explained to students studying the Reformation that Catholics are Christian, this is real.
Kevin M. Kruse@kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 3w agoAs someone who grew up Catholic in 1980s Nashville, hooooo boy.
Every time I read a story about gynecology it's always something like "doctors discovered women could experience pain in 1989 but decided not to act on this knowledge for 20 years"
19thnews@19thnews.org · 4w agoTrials found that Carevix — a portmanteau of “care” and “cervix" — reduced pain during IUD insertion by up to 73 percent and bleeding by 78 percent, compared to the tenaculum.
So, Graham died of an aortic dissection. This is something I have a bit of experience with, as I have a dissection that’s runs from about 1mm from my aortic root (close to the heart) and runs full length to the illiac artery high in my left leg. Thread:
It really helps to be a historian when your Italian neighbor tells you that Jannik Sinner is really not Italian- he’s from South Tyrol, a part of Italy where they speak German.
