K Colette Hill 🇨🇦

favourite part of my bookshelf

Woke up on International Women’s Day with one less hour to do all the things I have to do and my first thought was yeah that tracks.

Some underling was madly texted from AF1 at 3am and ordered to google Thucydides

I’m guessing someone at the White House just had “google hegemon” added to their job description

This week in email news, everyone who promised to circle back. They did not disappoint.

Inside the Home of ‘White Lotus’ Star F. Murray Abraham (Gift Article) The actor’s collection includes tributes to art, his wife and a life onstage.

It’s a lovely article overall. Gift link:

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Found in today’s NYT: an example of domestic writing “in the wild”.

In a deeply personal look at the home of F. Murray Abraham includes this photo of his granddaughter’s height chart and what it means to both of them. A testament to the importance of these artefacts as archives of family life!

Video: Opinion | Am I the Skinniest Person You’ve Ever Seen? My sister and I went on a joint diet. She stopped and I didn’t.

A beautiful piece by Aisha Marjara.

Am I the Skinniest Person You’ve Ever Seen? www.nytimes.com/video/opinio...

Clicking "submit" 50+ times and nothing is submitted. Signing in 100+ times. Repeatedly uploading all the clunky PDFs that refuse to attach. It's entirely possible I'm responsible for crashing the @sshrc-crsh.canada.ca website.

Amazing venue, so many interesting papers, lovely chats with new friends, cool streets to walk down, and proper fish and chips. Thank you @socialhistsoc.bsky.social for the opportunity to attend and present in the UK for the first time. #shsconf2025

Karen Harvey's lovely #SHSconf2025 keynote on 'trifling' letters in the c18th has me wanting to compose all my WhatsApp messages as little letters, with all their care for language, for a while. Since I basically only message my wife she in particular will be suffering.

Thank you to all who came out for our last panel on the last day. Such good discussions and many thanks to @zoejackson.bsky.social and our chair Leo Shipp for the generous and thoughtful discussion afterward. It was a great wrap up to #SHSConf2025

Thanatourism with Pippa Catterall. I’m not up for public executions but never miss a cemetery if I can help it! #SHCConf2025

Now I’m really ready. #SHSConf2025 #lastdaypanel

Day 2 conclusion: holding a conference at a living history museum with time to explore, eat, and play is an inspired choice. #SHSConf2025

Thrilled to be listening to Prof Karen Harvey, who is giving the keynote at #SHSConf2025!

Fascinating discussion of the ways in which letter-writers in 18th-century Britain 'belittled' their letters - and why!

🗃️✉️📜

Portion of fish and chips sitting in white paper.

Carousel with golden horses dancing around. My hand is holding a pint of beer in front of it (the focus has made this blurry)

Fairground stall to knock down cans. There are four piles of six cans visible, as well as a row of potential soft toy prizes to be won.

Picture of three fairground rides in the evening light with a dusky blue sky above.

To be fair, a chippy tea and then access to the fairground makes for a pretty epic first night of a conference! #SHSConf2025

Thoroughly enjoyed (and madly scribbled many notes) Domestic Interiors and Everyday Materiality panel with @emilycuming.bsky.social, @annaannawalsh.bsky.social and @luciejones83.bsky.social

Material culture of the home in three very different contexts, all of them fascinating! #SHSConf2025

Picture of the roundtable at the Social History Society, showing one man introducing the speakers and four people on the right hand side discussing the topic.

Fantastic roundtable at the #SHSConf2025 on material culture!

Featuring four fabulous speakers - @simonbriercliffe.bsky.social on @bclivingmuseum.bsky.social; @timhitchcock.bsky.social on convict tokens; @anahowie.bsky.social on portraiture & pearl fisheries & Simon Morgan on radical pottery✨

Last night’s material culture roundtable was a definite highlight, with an excellent introduction to collections and methodology of the Black Country Living Museum. #SHSConf2025

I really should have honed my elevator pitch prior to being asked what my research is about. Are you familiar with marginalia in books? I research marginalia in vernacular domestic dwellings. I’ll be presenting on Wednesday! #SHSConf2025

Arrived for some @socialhistsoc.bsky.social pre-conference touring of @bclivingmuseum.bsky.social. It took all of about 10 minutes for the room with the hob and pink transferware to find me #SHSConf2025

Conference Visit the post for more.

One more sleep! (for those who lose a day flying)

I simply cannot wait to meet some new people, and present my paper alongside some really fascinating researchers and their ideas (queer magic? scientific housewifery? memory and materiality of retirement gifts?) #SHSConf2025

It’s here! Objects of Poverty: Material Culture in Britain from 1700 www.bloomsbury.com/uk/objects-o...

Thank you for sharing this with me! @benbradleyca.bsky.social

So much of why I find domestic marginalia exciting is articulated here by Edmund de Waal.

“The building…is itself an archive…Text is everywhere—a name is written…A date, and then another and another, carved into the doorway or painted high above your head, kinds of reckonings.”

Trump Signs Executive Order Seeking to End Federal Funding for NPR and PBS (Gift Article) The Trump administration has accused the two broadcasters of using public funds to produce biased coverage and “left-wing propaganda.”

Not buying U.S. doesn’t hurt that much. Other losses remind me of those good parts of American culture that have been influential in my 🇨🇦 life. Solo trips to NYC, that time in undergrad I got to spend a week at Harvard doing research. Childhood memories of PBS. NPR. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/u...

The Magic of Children's Shoes - Digital Childhoods Much to the dismay of historians studying the material culture of early modern childhood, few examples of children’s clothing survive from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While textiles degra...

I'm really excited to share this fun little piece I wrote for the Society for the History of Children and Youth's Digital Childhoods Blog - I've fallen in love with little shoes and hope you do too!

shcydigitalchildhoods.org/dir/shoes-sh...

You could start with Rosenwein, Barbara H. Generations of Feeling : A History of Emotions, 600-1700. First edition. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Colour plan from 1925 showing a proposed four-bedroom house near Peel for Miss Morrison. Floor plans and elevations are shown.

Hand-drawn plan from 1888 showing the front elevation of the Walpole Hotel, which stood on Walpole Avenue in Douglas.

Spanning over a century, #IsleOfMan planning records constitute our most widely-used #ArchiveCollection. Casting light on the history of properties and the people connected to them, these records also work in tandem with other collections in our archive to aid research. #Archive30 #ManxArchives