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Rob Priest @rdpriest.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

A frontal engagement with the politics of who gets to label what as 'culture', 'cultural issues' and 'culture wars', why, and with what effects.

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Emile Chabal @emile-chabal.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Crisis, what crisis? www.the-tls.com/regular-feat...

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Rob Priest @rdpriest.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Some generative critiques here, e.g. "It gives us a phenomenology of contemporary politics, but not a logic. A book that did that couldn’t be so short or so sexy: it would have to look in great detail at why there is this uneven and combined development of civil society."

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Euan Huey @euan-huey.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I'm really happy to share that my article is now out in the Journal of Early Modern History and is open access!

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Rob Priest @rdpriest.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

An underappreciated book I always mention in my lecture on recent European history. A lot of writers on 'European integration' are either inside baseball, very zoomed-in, and/or operate with a postwar or at best twentieth-century frame of reference. Zielonka not the only wider view but a useful one.

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Jan-Werner Mueller @jwmueller-pu.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

How strong are the connections between democracy and what Joan Scott once called “a complicated idea with limited application” -- i.e. academic freedom?

verfassungsblog.de

Two Democratic Cheers for the University

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Charles West @pseudo-isidore.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Fascinating comparative graphic here: shows the UK's emphasis on early modern history especially. (no, I am not clear on the methodology)

bar chart comparing history publications by historians in Germany, France, UK and Netherlands

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Rob Priest @rdpriest.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Miloš Broćić and Galen Watts introduce a new special issue of IJPCS which debates how far "culture war" theories can describe new cultural conflicts. They wrestle with similar theoretical questions to my HWJ piece but in a very contemporary and empirical direction. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com

After Culture Wars—Rethinking Cultural Conflict in the Twenty-first Century: Introduction to the Special Issue - International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society

In this introductory essay, we argue that James Davidson Hunter’s classic text, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, although highly generative in its time, no longer provides an adequate gui...

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Rob Priest @rdpriest.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

A candid sentence that contains a history of 2020s European politics: "When it comes to people who want to come to Sweden who are not here yet, we have fairly similar policies [to the Right], but the difference is how we view people who are in Sweden." (Magdalena Andersson, Social Democrat, in Aug.)

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Rob Priest @rdpriest.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

'What an incredible photograph to illustrate Erika's lecture!', I thought, 'I wonder who it's by?' Of course I scroll down to: 'Image credit: Dr Erika Hanna'. Some people really can do it all. Friends and colleagues should get to her talk in Coventry.

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Rob Priest @rdpriest.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

My colleague Markus Daechsel wrote an enjoyably mind-bending article on magic books in Urdu in the early twentieth century, which is about capitalism, phenomenology, and many other things. And it is now in print. doi.org/10.1093/ehr/...

doi.org

Print Magic and Secularisation in Late Colonial India*

Abstract. A new genre of magic publications became prominent in the vernacular print culture of India in the aftermath of the First World War. It consisted

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Ned Richardson-Little @historyned.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The explicit plan of many intellectuals on the German far right is not to attack the constitution head on, but to culturally redefine key concepts of democracy, pluralism and rights so that its ethno-nationalist agenda is viewed as common sense.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

The writers of this show getting increasingly desperate in finding new ways to reset the status quo to “there is a Tory government”. “Guys, what if Farage just started saying and doing mad things, like ‘let’s dig up Napoleon III’?”

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Michael Ledger-Lomas @michaelledgerlomas.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

The social milieu here is very 1820s: wealthy City-ish people going evangelical and experimenting with country house sectarianism, tho a late Hanoverian Orr would have had different obsessions (the Bible's Antichrist, not Peter Thiel's; child labour; the restoration of the Jews to Palestine).

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Rob Priest @rdpriest.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

It's me; hi, I'm the problem, it's me.

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Rob Priest @rdpriest.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Anthony Chapman-Joy has a new article in German History on reactions in visual culture to the deployment of African troops during the Franco-Prussian War 1870-1. Even among European historians, I find many are unaware of such histories before the 20th-cy World Wars. academic.oup.com/gh/advance-a...

academic.oup.com

Abstract. The French use of colonial troops was integral to allied German conceptions of the Franco-Prussian War. Though German outcry at African soldiers

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