A Victorian couple actually smiling in a photo...

laminatedworm · 2 days

It's a great photo. I stumbled across a collection of them back in December and wrote a post about it on my research blog!

thatguyinthesky · 3 days

Last week I passed my viva examination and finally got my PhD. I'm only 25, but 8 straight years at university has felt, at times, like a very long road...

There aren't many jobs out there for history lecturers at the moment, but I'm proud of my achievement nonetheless. Next month I'm off to talk about my research in Germany!

clburton24 · 12 days

I got 100% on my General Studies A level exam. The maths part of it was composed of multiple choice questions and I filled in the last ten answers by choosing random letters. I'd tell you what the probability of me getting them all right was, but I'm terrible at maths. On paper though, I officially know everything about everything.

cuntxo · 17 days

History - BA, MA and PhD.

I enjoy it now, but when I first arrived at university I had relatively little enthusiasm for the subject. I wanted to work as a writer or a journalist, but was persuaded to take a more 'respectable' degree than Media Studies. I didn't enjoy it and, by the end of the first year, I was ready to drop out. Then, completely by chance, I happened upon a new resource that our university library had subscribed to. It was an online, keyword searchable archive of The Times stretching back some 200 years. I spent a few hours browsing through it and, before long, I was hooked. For the first time it was possible for me to do my own, original research. Instead of being spoon fed the same old sources and answering the same old questions, I was doing something NEW. It finally sparked my enthusiasm.

Long story short, my grades began to improve, I graduated at the top of my year, went onto to do an MA and a PhD and now I'm an academic press historian who uses digital archives to try and inspire a future generation of students to follow my hopelessly ill conceived career path!

uniquelikeyou · 21 days

My first response to this was, 'who the hell is Dr. Eams?' I need to get out of academia before it's too late...

jasiones · 1 month

This surprises me too. I work as an academic historian and so it's fairly normal for me to be in a situation where I know more about the past than the people around me. I don't expect them to know the little details, but so many people don't even have a grasp of the basics. Every single thing we see and do is the product of processes reaching back thousands of years. It's impossible to understand who/what/where we are without knowing how we got here, and yet people seem content to live in complete ignorance. It's staggering.

jasiones · 1 month

I'm reasonably proficient with technology, but the only mobile I've ever been able to use without getting confused and angrily mashing buttons is my iPhone. All of the other ones I've owned seem to have been spawned from the same usability hell as printers and photocopiers.

argh7272 · 1 month

BA in history followed by an MA in Victorian Studies and a PhD. I'm a historian!

variousrandomnoises · 2 months

Speaking as a university lecturer, the only unconvincing part of this comic was the panel in which a student proof reads their work. To all of you writing essays for tomorrow: we don't mind the odd typo, but if whole sentences don't make sense and your paragraph structuring is sloppy then you're going to get a disappointing mark. I always have a pretty good sense of what mark I'll award an essay after reading the first few sentences; I've never failed one that was competently written.

theultimatetk · 2 months

I found the earliest reference to word globetrotter listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. It's all been downhill since then...

whompah · 2 months

Hah! I was at uni for 8 years in Manchester, but you've missed your chance. I'm even deeper in enemy territory now... Swansea.

whompah · 2 months

In the 1850s, when the first transatlantic telegraph cable was (ultimately unsuccessfully) laid between Britain and America, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic thought that it would unite both countries into a shared Anglo-American consciousness. "THERE IS NO MORE SEA!", ran one headline, "BRITAIN AND AMERICA FACE TO FACE!" They were convinced that a new age of instantaneous communication and heightened cultural exchange would break down conceptions of national boundaries. Britain did enter into a more regular dialogue with America, and forms of American popular culture began to circulate on the other side of the Atlantic, but both countries maintained a strong sense of national identity. TV and the Internet have thickened and accelerated the connections between Britain and America, but the age of a shared Anglo-American consciousness still hasn't arrived. We're getting closer though, and international communities like Reddit are making a big difference. Im also a Yorkshireman, and since joining the site I find myself increasingly blind to the Americanness of a tv show, performer, word, or commodity. Culture is globalising; the boundaries are dissolving.

IronMeghan · 3 months

I don't see how your friend could hate 80s saxophone solos, but you'll find a good cheesy one at the start of Leonard Cohen's 'Ain't No Cure For Love'.

Rosetti · 3 months

I've just moved down to Swansea to lecture at the university - students keep telling me that I've got a really unusual accent. At least they don't think I'm a Geordie...

Rosetti · 3 months

If you'd like to see what Whitby looked like in the 19th century, have a look at the photography of Frank Meadow Sutcliffe. His work is brilliantly atmospheric and captures the feel of the town around about the period in which Bram Stoker wrote Dracula.

The slide show on that website sets up some brilliant comparisons between then and now.

Rosetti · 3 months

I went to school in Saltburn. It's odd to discover so many other people from Cleveland/Teesside on Reddit...

fuzzo · 4 months

It's an extremely frustrating situation. I recently had my first proper academic article published in the journal Media History. It took months to research and write, over a year to filter through peer review and typesetting (and that was with no major corrections), and now hardly anybody can access it. By contrast, when I wrote an article for The Guardian it appeared in the paper two days after I finished it and was made freely available online. More people have read that short, relatively lightweight piece than will ever read my proper academic research. I'd love to publish in open access journals, but they're currently regarded as less prestigious than their print counterparts - I couldn't care less about this, but potential employers and research councils do. Few academics want to be locked into this terrible system, but few are brave enough to abandon it.

boweruk · 4 months

Hah! You should probably re-tag me as 'wrote for The Guardian once but now they won't reply to his e-mails'!

boweruk · 4 months

Yep - the 'British' accent (generally referred to as Received Pronunciation or Standard English) was developed, disseminated, and codified at the same time as American English. Both have their roots in a shared collection of dialects (with a few European/Native American dialects added for America), but branched off in different directions during the 18th and 19th centuries. So, the idea that American English deviated from an age-old British standard that we still use today isn't accurate. Neither language has a definitive claim to represent the true continuation of Chaucer's 'well of English undefiled'.

Interestingly, before the Revolution, lots of British travellers observed that American colonists spoke the language with more clarity and purity than speaker of regional dialects back home!

boweruk · 4 months

Hah! Only just realised I posted the link to the mobile version. Sorry!

boweruk · 4 months

Cheers - this is one of the most readable intros to the subject around. Bryson is brilliant.

boweruk · 4 months

Im an academic historian, so it isnt my day job. I sent them an email saying something like: 'I'm sure you've seen the slang debate doing the rounds in the press - how about a historical perspective?'. They agreed, i wrote it that afternoon, and two days later it was published!

boweruk · 4 months

I've used Mencken in my academic research, though more as a primary source than a secondary account. It's an extremely influential piece of research and has done much to shape subsequent debates in the history of American English. However, his overt nationalism and anti-Britiah sentiments mean you have to be careful when examining his thoughts on Anglo-American relations. At times, he promotes the myth that the heroic pioneers of American English were scoffed at by snooty British commentators when, in actual fact, Victorian responses to the language were more complex. I don't mean to be too critical though - his American Language is a landmark study in the field and still holds up to scrutiny in most areas.

boweruk · 4 months

The image isn't entirely mine - I put it together from three 19th century Punch cartoons using photoshop. It's lifted from a longer PowerPoint animation that I use in my talks/lectures. I told the paper not to credit me as the original illustrator, but I changed so much (colouring, background, facial expressions, speech box, etc) that I can probably get away with claiming it!

boweruk · 4 months

I think I respond to that point in the original comments - its a quote from a Victorian newspaper review of one of Twain's public lectures. He was recounting his experiences in California. I suspect the reviewer just assumed his accent belonged to that state rather than his true home.

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