iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 45m

It’s on for a very brief time but if you happen to find yourself in Paris unexpectedly as I did this week I highly recommend going to the small, simple, but worthwhile Marc Bloch exhibition at the Pantheon (presented to celebrate his and Simonne’s entry)

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

A hell of a 1-2 punch in this 1885 school logbook here: '7th. Mr Jaques absent from school today - No reason sent. 8th. Mr Jaques came to school this morning and informed me that the cause of his absence was Cholera'

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Reposted by Alex Wakelam

Alice Reid @amrcampop.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Interested in a PhD in historical demography/population studies at @camunicampop.bsky.social, @camunigeography.bsky.social, Cambridge University? We have 3 suggested topics (see thread): contact me to discuss, or to suggest your own idea. Apply by early December for funded places.

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

'I punished a boy for using coarse language in School, & in the Afternoon his mother came & used the same kind of language before the whole school'. An absolute queen standing up for her boy Bradford Parish Church School Logbook 1863

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

"Excuse me for saying that your answer to my letter contains less of argument and reasoning than of injurious insinuation, claptrap declamation, and revolutionary menace". RIP George Poulett Scrope (1797-1876), you'd have loved BlueSky / peak Twitter discourse

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Well that will teach me to check for celestial events the next time I book theatre tickets for a random Wednesday starting at 7

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Nobody is as committed to the work from home mindset as the guy I just saw on the bus wearing Zoom merch

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

I love living in a multicultural city of a thousand languages but I do think it should be a legal requirement that if you have a big row outside it should have to legally be in the one I personally speak so I can listen in

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Faculty's decision to make us actually record holiday days (instead of the previous practice where nobody took days off) is going swimmingly as their records currently suggest that I partied so hard on every public holiday this year that it counted as two or even three days off. What a Chirstmas!

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Also I voted bright and early this morning and when the R*form woman on the door wished me a good morning I instinctively said “Not for you I hope” which might be the politest rebuke of those wankers possible

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

I cannot believe my university is now making us record when we take annual leave instead of just saying “meh go away whenever”. Don’t they realise that if I know how many days I have left I might actually take them instead of just working everyday?

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

I’ve spent so much time over the last few weeks reading Victorian civil service letters I’ve found I’ve started to talk in keeping with their general style, a source of great discontent amongst many of us here. I have the honour to be Your most Obedient & humble servant A Wakelam, esq

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

Bradford Chamber of Commerce learned in 1916 what many of us knew already: women love trams.

Excerpt of a 1916 report into labour shortages in Bradford, identifying that women left weaving jobs to work on the Trams and would not return

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

In the 18th century jury trial was eroded for poor debtors, instead being dealt with by magistrates (sounds familiar to me). Decisions were arbitrary and the poor suffered. MPs, intellectuals, and even local tradesman spoke out in defence of the ‘the ancient and valuable privilege of trial by Jury’

Extract from my book Credit and Debt in Eighteenth-Century England (2020) on the debate around loss of trial by jury for small debts

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

Just found in the Department for Education archives the perfect band name and album cover for starting the hottest indie band of 2007

19th Century Folder with "OBSOLETE BYELAWS" typed across it

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

'that they have now determined to ... to' WHAT DID YOU DETERMINE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD TELL ME WHAT YOU DETERMINED

Segment from a letter from 1877 sent by the Education Department which inexplicably leaves the results of their determination blank

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

I’m at the national archives and just walked past somebody carrying a bundle of documents with massive “TOP SECRET” stamps all over it and a date mark of 1944. Is it bad form to sit next to them and read over their shoulder?

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

“And Tiny Tim, who did not die” clearly implies that either Tiny Tim is still alive in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty five or that he regenerates like the doctor either of which fills me with abject terror.

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Reposted by Alex Wakelam

Lewis Goodall @lewisgoodall.com · 07/10/2025

Birmingham, my home city, is a fantastic city, with fantastic people- a success story. It has its problems, like anywhere. But the obsession the online right has with it is as transparent as it gets.

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

Ah the Victorian period, when it was more important to save a few pennies on a second sheet of paper than for the recipient of your letter to be able to read what you’d written

A letter from the middle of the nineteenth century. Rather than using another sheet of paper, the writer has turned the page 90 degrees and written over what they had already written.

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

Loving all the various “this is what causes low birth rates” posts tonight when we still haven’t fully worked out what caused them to start declining IN 1850 (when kids were still very much at work and there was no easy contraception)

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

Begging 19th Century writers to just be normal for five minutes was apparently a fools errand. I'm several pages in and none the wiser at what should be a mild complaint about an aspect of Bradford society c.1820: 'Tweedle, Tweedle, Tweedle, Some Catgut to my Feedle' (??)

The title page of a 19th Century book published in Bradford inexplicably called "The Retort Courteous; or, The Descent of Mr Baines, From the Pinnacle to the Pickle Pot"

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Reposted by Alex Wakelam

John Gallagher @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

Seeing a lot of critical responses from medievalists about this BBC 1066 thing. As an early modernist, just to say that I'm happy to confirm that medieval people were indeed covered in dirt all the time and did all sound like they were in the Wurzels.

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

There is no better feeling when travelling abroad than your phone magically picking up Eduroam

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

I maintain that early modern historians remain the most whimsical historians

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Reposted by Alex Wakelam

The London Journal @thelondonjournal.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

Followed by 'Jewish Credit, Debt, and Economic Integration in Eighteenth-Century London', by @awakelam.bsky.social: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.....

Abstract
Early modern London’s population explosion was reliant upon the constant arrival of migrants, predominantly from the provinces but joined by a variety of those born overseas. After re-admittance during the Commonwealth in 1656, Jews made up an increasingly large proportion of immigrants. However, centuries of antisemitic distrust did not disappear, and London’s Jews faced unique obstacles to integration in the city, not least in their ability to engage in the credit market that underpinned commerce. Using surviving debt imprisonment records, this article analyses the extent to which Jews were able to overcome sustained prejudice and integrate broadly in London’s commercial environment. It suggests Jews were, by the second half of the century, just as likely to be imprisoned for debts as to imprison others, while the sums owed, the occupational structure, and residential geography of Jewish Londoners suggest that integration was frequently dependent on wealth and class.

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Reposted by Alex Wakelam

Alice Reid @amrcampop.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

Campop blog #50: In 2021, 76% of UK women with children at home were employed: a century earlier about the same % were engaged in 'home duties'. @awakelam.bsky.social explores patterns and implications from the 1921 census @camunicampop.bsky.social www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/2025/05...

campop.geog.cam.ac.uk

The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, CambridgeHome Duties in the 1921 Census « Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death...

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

'Miss Ashworth ... sang the air "Pious Orgies" tastefully and correctly', sometimes its ok to acknowledge the meaning of a word has changed without trying to work out what it used to mean using a work laptop. (Todmorden and Hebden Bridge Weekly Advertiser 8th March 1862)

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

Loved getting to chat debt imprisonment with Layton Williams, one of the nicest human beings I've ever met, on Who Do You Think You Are? last night even if I only had bad news for him www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Went to Rome. Got threatened by a mirror. 10/10

A sing on a mirror in a church in Rome reading: “Mirror yourself, mirror yourself, one day you'll end up like this! Beyond aesthetics, take more care of your soul that does not age or die, save it!”

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Standing in a non-moving queue and the American behind me is loudly asking “why are they just making us and here like this”. ITS BECAUSE WE LIKE IT THAT’S WHY.

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Taxi driver just turned up the radio volume dramatically because The Script came on and I think this must be some sort of crime

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Feeling a lot of affinity with this church advert(?) outside the office every time I look at the news

Sign outside a church reading: “Jesus Christ. The same yesterday, today, and forever”

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

"A man's ruling passion is to eat' - the Leeds Times in 1841 was really speaking my language

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

If I were attending this conference and was introduced to any moustachioed Belgian academics, I would run as fast as I could away from the train

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

Trying to decide if I should go to Wakefield archives solely to find out what the hell is in this box.

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

I can always tell if the undergraduates have returned by whether the heating has been switched on yet. The undergraduates, dear reader, have not yet returned.

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Was wondering if the Spanish Flu stopped British couples from ... "reconnecting" after the First World War. No. No it did not. (data estimated from age given in years and months in the 1921 Census minus nine months)

Graph of the estimated number of conceptions per month in England and Wales between October 1917 and July 1920 based on data from the 1921 Census. It demonstrates that while conception rates were low during the First World War, after the armistice there was a sudden and significant increase in conception rates which was not deterred by the three waves of Spanish Flu.

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

Setting up for my annual Christmas tradition: crying for 130 minutes while watching It’s a Wonderful Life

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

Aren't we all Mr Matthew Moncrieff Pattison

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Another morning of the endless quantitative historian battle: have I discovered something new and interesting or am I secretly just bad at maths?

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

'However, as the Jewish population of London grew and proliferated it probably became more difficult over time to attribute such negative characteristics to Abraham next door with whom one could certainly do business.' www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

tandfonline.com

Jewish Credit, Debt, and Economic Integration in Eighteenth-Century London

Early modern London’s population explosion was reliant upon the constant arrival of migrants, predominantly from the provinces but joined by a variety of those born overseas. After re-admittance du...

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Really hope Ridley Scott shows the same deliberate disdain for historians in the Beatles film as he did in Napoleon. Can’t wait to see Ringo leading a cavalry charge at the Battle of Borodino.

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

It’s so windy in London that I’m pretty sure it instead of the tube it would be faster to hold my umbrella higher and fly Mary Poppins style across the capital

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Cannot understand why this interviewer in the 1970s felt it wasn't necessary to ask more questions about this Edwardian cat. TELL ME EVERYTHING ABOUT HIM

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

15 years on twitter, years of hard research driven work, nothing compares to finding a tortoise in the 1921 census

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

One of the joys of working more on the early 20th Century is using my treasure trove of family photos in presentations. This one of my great grandfather William's WW1 unit is rather spoilt by his decision to stand behind the flag, making him only recognisable by his distinctive ears

A photo from the time of the First World War of a support unit of bakers including a donkey carrying a Union Jack which obscures a key member of the photo's face

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

First World War had a lot of long term impacts but it also created a crisis in care. Not all those killed were young men, many left behind widows and children. Census data suggests kids 1-9 in 1921 were more likely to have lost a father than at any other census

Graph of age groups in censuses 1851-1921 in England and Wales who had lost their father by that age. It shows a general decline over time in this rate until a significant increase in the 1921 census due to the First World War

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Alex Wakelam @awakelam.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Thought I'd liven up my project on orphanhood with some oral history aspects but was not ready for this absolutely devastating old lady recalling her her sister's funeral

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