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@kefauver4prez.bsky.socialOct 7, 2026, 1:41 AM

A winner's handshake!

Gordon Browning and Estes Kefauver congratulate each other on their wins in the 1948 Tennessee Democratic primary. Browning defeated incumbent Jim McCord to win the nomination for Governor, while Kefauver captured the nomination for Senator.

#skystorians #history #polisky

@iduhouse.bsky.socialOct 7, 2026, 1:32 AM

📽️ Artist of the Day: Cauleen Smith

Cauleen Smith works across film, installation, and community practice to imagine Black futures shaped by care, joy, and collective vision. Her art asks what liberation looks like when we design it together.

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #BlackSky #BlackSkyArt #Art

Portrait of Cauleen Smith in her studio, photographed by Joshua Franzos for the 2022 Heinz Awards. Smith stands at a worktable covered in white paper, one hand resting on it and the other at her hip. She wears dark green trousers, a pale pink sheer blouse with a ruffled placket and blue-framed glasses. Behind her, painted panels fill the room with washed bands of blue, pink, yellow, green, and rust; fragments of handwritten words hover through the color. The portrait places Smith inside the layered environment her practice has become known for. She trained as a filmmaker, earning her BA at San Francisco State and MFA at UCLA, but her work expanded beyond a single screen into banners, textiles, sculpture, sound, projection, procession, and room-sized installation. Experimental cinema still provides the grammar. Structural film, Third World Cinema, science fiction, Black feminist thought, and histories of Black music become tools for asking how images shape us and how communities might imagine themselves otherwise. By the time this photograph was made, the Heinz Foundation was honoring Smith for a practice that keeps changing form. Her 2017 Whitney Biennial presentation included hand-sewn banners carried through New York in a musical procession; Give It or Leave It later joined film, light, disco balls, objects, and architecture into environments about Alice Coltrane, Noah Purifoy, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and radical generosity. Smith has described her work as an offering to Black diasporic invention, survival, and generativity. That idea helps explain the studio behind her. Painting leaks into text; cinema leaves the screen; research becomes atmosphere. In 2026, the same method has reached the Venice Biennale through The Wanda Coleman Songbook, a multisensory portrait of Los Angeles. The forms keep moving, but the question remains: what worlds become possible when Black imagination is treated not as escape, but as a way of building reality?Production still from Cauleen Smith’s 2018 film Sojourner. Under the desert sun at Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Art Museum in Joshua Tree, an ensemble of women pose across a concrete platform beneath exposed roof beams. Their clothes turn the group into visual rhythm: lime yellow, green plaid, red satin, black-and-white geometric print, purple, denim, florals, headwraps, jewelry, visors, and bright socks. At center, a woman in a fitted black-and-white jumpsuit steps forward while others sit, stand, lean into one another, or gaze upward. Smith built this scene as a reimagining of a 1966 photograph by Life photographer Bill Ray showing nine Black men near Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers. She changes the gendered center of gravity and relocates the gathering to Purifoy’s desert environment, where discarded material had already become art and social thought. Purifoy helped found the Watts Towers Art Center, made assemblages from debris after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, and later turned ten acres of Joshua Tree desert into an museum. Sojourner brings that history into conversation with other Black experiments in community: Alice Coltrane’s Vedantic ashram, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Sojourner Truth, and the Combahee River Collective. Their words and ideas move through the film like messages across time. Smithsonian curator Saisha Grayson describes the young women as liberation messengers, carrying radios and listening for what earlier generations transmit. Smith is less interested in utopia as fantasy than in people who practiced pieces of it through collective life, spiritual discipline, art, feminism, and mutual responsibility. The cast’s futuristic styling does not ask us to abandon history. It asks what happens when history becomes usable material for another future. In this frame, community itself is the image: many bodies, many styles, one temporary constellation. Smith replaces the heroic lone visionary with something more demanding and more hopeful, a world built together.Portrait of Cauleen Smith photographed by G L Askew II for the Los Angeles Times in 2023. Smith stands against a beige wall with her hands clasped, wearing a black button-front blouse scattered with tiny white specks, a chunky silver chain, and a pleated black skirt whose lower edge erupts into a multicolored printed image. Her locs frame her face and she looks slightly upward with a small smile. The photograph accompanied an unusual project: Smith interviewed Los Angeles artist George Evans, brother of poet Wanda Coleman, while following the cultural routes that shaped them both. Smith had returned to Los Angeles after years away and was using Coleman’s writing as a guide through what Coleman called the city’s “Deep West,” where glamour, racism, Black invention, labor, migration, and myth coexist. Evans opened doors into that history. He spoke about his family’s advertising business, Black-owned Golden State Mutual Life Insurance and its art collection, Beat poets in Echo Park, the Watts Rebellion, and meeting Noah Purifoy while Purifoy gathered fire-scarred debris from the streets. For Smith, the conversation deepened a lineage she already felt as a Northern California-born Black artist shaped by West Coast experimental culture. She was researching Coleman because she heard music inside her poetry. That research grew into The Wanda Coleman Songbook, first presented in New York in 2024 and now part of the 2026 Venice Biennale. There, four channels surround visitors with lowriders, flower stalls, liquor stores, the Hollywood Hills, Baldwin Hills oil wells, and Coleman’s books, while seven Black composers respond to lines. The installation turns Los Angeles into sound, image, scent, memory, and argument. Seen from that later chapter, this portrait records Smith not only as an artist but as a listener. Her practice often begins by finding a person, place, archive, or artwork whose signal is still alive, then building a form generous enough for others to hear it too.Installation view of Cauleen Smith’s Epistrophy, 2018, inside the darkened exhibition Give It or Leave It. A taxidermied black raven bends over a rock at left; potted snake plants rise under magenta light; shells, stones, vessels, a radio, books, trays, and found things sit among four video monitors. One screen shows a sunlit landscape, while large projections spill fragments of sky, terrain, and figures onto the walls. Closed-circuit cameras aim at the tabletop, combining these intimate objects with moving backgrounds so that a small sculpture can suddenly inhabit a desert, a cosmic horizon, or some invented elsewhere. Smith calls the objects an archive of associations, travels, affections, desires, questions, and longings. The title comes from Thelonious Monk’s composition “Epistrophy,” and improvisation is central to the work. Smith also connects the piece to the Art Ensemble of Chicago and its use of “little instruments,” bells, toys, gongs, bird calls, whistles, and other sound-makers that widened what Black experimental music could contain. Epistrophy asks what an equivalent might look like in expanded cinema. Instead of treating filmmaking as camera plus screen, Smith lets plants, minerals, figurines, surveillance technology, NASA imagery, National Geographic landscapes, memory, and chance become instruments. Cameras watch the objects, but the objects escape ordinary meanings as projections enlarge and relocate them. First shown at ICA Philadelphia in 2018, Epistrophy became part of Smith’s traveling Give It or Leave It exhibition and entered LACMA’s collection. The work reveals why Smith’s installations are not simply films displayed in galleries. She builds conditions for perception. A raven, plant, cheap figurine, or glass vessel may be mundane alone; beside an unfamiliar object and projected into another world, it becomes a portal. The audience completes the circuit by making associations of its own.
@gzamore.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 9:20 PM

Me: spends years lowering thresholds to the field for curious students.

Colleague (modern historian, knows nothing about Medieval History) to prospective thesis student: Oh, you want to study medieval history? That’s difficult. What about sources?

Me:

#skystorians #medievalhistory

@fancyhistorian.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 6:57 PM

*chef's kiss*

Happy book launch to the exquisite @stephhoward-smith.bsky.social 🥂🐾

And for those who have not had the pleasure of holding 'Yap!' in their own paws, you can find it in all good (UK) bookshops on Thursday!!

#skystorians #dogs #18thcentury

@ideasroadshow.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 4:33 PM

Madonna with Child by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, 1467-1516. It is easy to get overwhelmed by so much beauty. 🏵️

Join our community of curious art lovers & armchair travellers on Exploring Art History here (free): ideasroadshow.substack.com

🗃️ #arthistory #medievalsky #skystorians #art #italy

Detail of face of Madonna with Child by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, 1467-1516Madonna with Child by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, 1467-1516Detail of the Christ Child in Madonna with Child by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, 1467-1516
@stephanieoffer.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 1:31 PM

Has anyone got any idea what this name is? Is it really "Potty Vaughan"? Context is Sarah Grizzell Apthorp's will in 1833 #C18th #Skystorians 🗃 #C19th

A section of an will from 1833 with a name that is hard to read highlighted
@huguenotsociety.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 1:26 PM

Among the extensive historic records held in the Huguenot library are rare pamphlets such as this one. If you would like to explore the collection, book an appointment via
[email protected]

#skystorians
# academia
#genealogy
#huguenots

Chants pour le bicentenaire de la glorieuse rentrée des Vaudois dans leurs vallées, 1689-1889. [Turnin: C. Maurer, 1889].
@ideasroadshow.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 12:32 PM

🐑 The Lamb of the Apocalypse on an Altar by Benozzo Gozzoli, c. 1459-1460, Magi Chapel, Florence.

Note the 7 candlesticks & 7 seals pointing to the Apocalypse of St John the Evangelist. Read more: ideasroadshow.substack.com/p/three-hidd...

🗃️ #arthistory #medievalsky #skystorians #art #italy

The Lamb of the Apocalypse on an Altar by Benozzo Gozzoli, c. 1459-1460, Magi Chapel, Florence, showing a large lamb lying on altar facing us. There are 7 candlesticks and seals referring to St. John's Apocalypse..
@writersofwrongs.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 11:14 AM

#OTD (Oct. 6) in 1928, "Mike Schatz" #Abbatemarco, underworld boss in the #Gowanus area of #Brooklyn, was found shot to death in his car.

www.writersofwrongs....

#NewYork #MafiaHistory #History #Skystorians

@vch-home.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 10:41 AM

We're really excited to share updates on our exciting new projects in #Devon, #Dorset, #Kent , #Lincolnshire an #London in our latest blog with @ihr.bsky.social, part of our wonderful community of projects.

Please take a look!

#Skystorians

@glmasson.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 10:38 AM

#TIOL #CFP submit your 200 word abstract & bio by 15th November on our website! #travellersinottomanlands #ottoman #history #skystorians #conference #seminar #callforpapers

@mobhistory.substack.comOct 6, 2026, 10:10 AM

#OTD (Oct 06)
Events in U.S. organized crime #history.

#Brooklyn #KansasCity #NewOrleans #Massachusetts #Cleveland #Philadelphia #FarmingdaleNY #NewYork #Mafia #MafiaHistory 🗃️ #Skystorians

On this date, Oct 06... • in 1928, just before dawn, the dead body of Brooklyn gangster Michael Abbatemarco is found in the driver's seat of his parked but still idling Nash coupe. • in 1930, Carmelo Piraino, 23-year-old son of a murdered Mafia leader, is shot to death on 85th Street in Bath Beach, Brooklyn. • in 1951, Anthony Ferrantelli of Kansas City passes away at age 74. • in 1964, Carlos Marcello is indicted for bribing a juror. • in 1966, Massachusetts mobster Joseph 'Baron' Barboza is arrested while in possession of a rifle, a pistol and a knife. • in 1977, Cleveland racketeer Danny Greene is murdered in a car-bombing. • in 1981, Philadelphia Crime Family associate John Calabrese is shot to death on Christian Street. • in 2008, FBI agents searching for mob victims on a Farmingdale, Long Island, property, discover a body wrapped in a tarp. Image of Carlos Marcello.
@ijhs.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 9:32 AM

#skystorians 🗃️ #sporthistory

📍New article!

"Before the World Was Watching: Qatar and the 1981 FIFA World Youth Championship"

by Wadha F. Al-Naemi and Thomas Ross Griffin

Check it out:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

@hisjournalha.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 9:20 AM

#Skystorians This Bloomsbury webinar tomorrow (7 Oct) on Bloomsbury Digital Resources may be of interest www.bloomsbury.com/us/discover/...

@chei-leiden.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 4:31 AM

We are very excited to continue our seminar series for this semester. Our next session will be by Kai Hebel discussing his recent book, "Britain, Détente, and the Helsinki CSCE: 'Fathers of the Final Act’'. All welcome! #skystorians #historybooks #EU

CHEI seminar series
@kefauver4prez.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 1:41 AM

When Eisenhower's administration tried to kill a public power project, Kefauver fought back with hearings exposing a giveaway to private industry. He couldn’t save the dam, but won a different victory.

The Hells Canyon Dam fight:
estes-kefauver.com/2026/10/05/w...

#skystorians #history #polisky

@iduhouse.bsky.socialOct 5, 2026, 11:07 PM

🎤 Artist of the Day: Little Simz

A storyteller and lyricist whose words cut through noise, Little Simz turns truth into rhythm. Her music blends vulnerability with confidence, charting a path of self-definition through sound and poetry.

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #MusicSky #BlackSky #Art

Black-and-white close portrait of Little Simz from British Vogue’s December 2023 “Tradition & Revolution” issue, photographed by Tim Walker. Simz wears a pale tailored jacket, small hoop earrings, a chain necklace, dramatic eye makeup, and natural locs sculpted upward into branching, hornlike forms that cast shadows across the plain background. She looks slightly upward past the camera, serious and alert. The hair is not incidental. In the accompanying interview, Simz said she had once hated her natural hair after years of straightening, quiffs, and bad dye jobs, but had reached a point where wearing it made her feel “beautiful and divine feminine.” Vogue described the sculptural tresses as a sign of growing confidence. That shift mirrors the larger arc of her career. Born Simbiatu Ajikawo and raised in Islington by Nigerian parents, she built herself outside the machinery that was supposed to validate her: youth-club performances at St Mary’s, music uploaded to SoundCloud and Bandcamp, and releases through her own Age 101 imprint. By 2023 she had already won the Mercury Prize for Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, a Brit Award, and an Ivor Novello, while acting in Top Boy and expanding into photography and fashion. Yet the portrait resists triumphalism. The expression is watchful; the styling is both armor and self-recognition. Two years later, Lotus would emerge from betrayal, burnout, and a near-decision to quit music, with Simz choosing renewal rather than retreat. By 2025 she was curating Meltdown and being honored as a Cultural Innovator by the British Fashion Council. Seen now, the hair becomes a visual thesis: growth does not require becoming someone else. Simz’s power has increasingly come from occupying every part of herself at once: rapper, actor, photographer, Nigerian-British daughter, introvert, fashion figure, and artist unwilling to surrender control of her own story. It is self-possession rendered not as spectacle, but as a decision to remain whole.Color portrait of Little Simz seated on a wooden chair against a pale studio wall for British Vogue’s December 2023 issue, photographed by Tim Walker and styled by Kate Phelan. She rests her chin on one fist and looks directly at the camera, wearing a fitted brown-and-black Maison Margiela playsuit, bright yellow socks, chunky dark platform shoes, and a green track jacket striped with blue, black, and yellow that slips from one shoulder. Her locs are piled into a high knot, with several falling down the front of her body. The pose is quiet, conversational, but the styling mixes sportswear, tailoring, pattern, and androgyny in the same way Simz’s music refuses one lane. She grew up in north London hearing Nas, Ms Dynamite, garage, grime, neo-soul, funk, Afrobeat, and reggae, then learned early how to make work without much money or industry permission. As a teenager she paid £1 to use St Mary’s Youth Club, where she met collaborators including dancer Kloe Dean and producer Inflo. By 21 she had already released mixtapes, EPs, and a debut album through her own Age 101 label. Independence became aesthetic as well as business practice. In the Vogue interview, Simz described carving a sound rooted in hip-hop but willing to move into alternative spaces, while her stylist Luci Ellis linked her fashion evolution to letting go of boundaries. The clothes in this image make that philosophy visible: feminine and masculine codes, luxury and streetwear, softness and structure coexist without asking to be reconciled. That same refusal would later animate Lotus, where bossa nova, punk, Afrobeat, garage, soul, jazz, and rap all sit inside one emotional world. Simz has said the common denominator is simply being herself. This portrait catches that idea before it became the thesis of another album. She is seated, still, and unshowy, but the image contains a career-long insistence: creative freedom is not about choosing among identities. It is about refusing the demand to choose at all.British Vogue’s December 2023 cover starring Little Simz, photographed by Tim Walker for the magazine’s “Great Britain: Tradition & Revolution” issue. Simz faces the camera in an all-white ensemble: tailored layers by Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood, a Polo Ralph Lauren hoodie, an Emma Willis shirt, a hat by Nerida Fraiman, and white boxing gloves raised beneath her chin. The red VOGUE masthead stretches across the top; black cover text reads “Great BRITAIN — TRADITION & REVOLUTION.” Simz smiles slightly from inside the fighter’s stance. The metaphor is unusually literal for an artist whose career was built through persistence. Raised on a north London council estate, she rejected early record deals and released music independently through Age 101, even when critical acclaim outpaced resources. In 2022 she won the Mercury Prize for Sometimes I Might Be Introvert and the Brit Award for Best New Artist, bringing her mother onstage for the latter. A year later British Vogue placed her among six cover stars representing contemporary Britain, alongside Stormzy, Tilda Swinton, Jodie Comer, Olivia Colman, and Kate and Lila Moss. In the accompanying interview, Simz reflected on setbacks, rejection, financial strain, and remaining independent, then ended with the same logic the boxing gloves make visible: what she wants will not come easily, but she is prepared to fight for it. The cover also belongs to Edward Enninful’s final December issue as editor-in-chief, revisiting the “Great Britain” theme of his first issue six years earlier. Simz appears not simply as a rapper invited into fashion, but as part of a changing national portrait: Nigerian-British, self-directed, multidisciplinary, and difficult to categorize. In 2025 the British Fashion Council named her Cultural Innovator, recognizing how far that influence had spread beyond records. The gloves are costume, wit, and biography at once. Simz is dressed in white, but nothing about the image suggests surrender.Cover art for Little Simz’s 2021 album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, often shortened to SIMBI, a title that echoes her first name, Simbiatu. Against a mustard-yellow background, Simz crouches low in an orange-and-dark-blue checkerboard suit, glasses on her nose, looking sideways toward the camera. Her locs form a looping structure that rises above her head like sculpture. Along the left edge, a black Japanese-style obi strip carries the album title and artist name in yellow and white lettering. The campaign was directed and designed by Jeremy Ngatho Cole, with photography by Nwaka Okparaeke, styling by Luci Ellis, hair by Chantelle Fuller, and makeup by Nibras. After the tightly focused GREY Area, Simz used lockdown solitude to turn inward and make a record about introversion, family, womanhood, race, fame, ambition, and the cost of success. She told Apple Music that solitude could be a place of contentment; elsewhere she described finding power in introversion rather than treating quietness as weakness. The album sounds anything but small: orchestral fanfares, soul, funk, jazz, Afrobeat, rap, and cinematic interludes expand around her voice, while actor Emma Corrin appears as the narrator. Simz and childhood collaborator Inflo built a work grand enough to hold private thought at public scale. The album won the 2022 Mercury Prize, confirming what its cover already suggests: introspection can be regal, theatrical, and commanding. The image also marks a chapter in Simz’s visual authorship. She remained independent through Age 101, worked with a close creative team, and made a campaign whose styling became inseparable from the record’s identity. Four years later, Lotus deliberately became her first album not to put her face on the cover, replacing portraiture with a flower associated with renewal. That contrast makes SIMBI even more revealing: here Simz places herself at the center of the frame while learning that looking inward can be a source of outward power.