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@historicumnet.bsky.socialOct 5, 2026, 8:20 AM

Our "Regional History Portal" provides a guide to over 2,000 online resources on German regional history, neatly arranged by German state or by type of resource.
The portal is now availiable in English, as are most other sites on historicum_net:
www.historicum.net/en/regional-...

#skystorians

Screenshot of the Region Histoy Portal showing maps and names of six German states.
@boydellandbrewer.bsky.socialOct 5, 2026, 8:15 AM

New month = new books! Take a look at what's publishing in October 👉 buff.ly/pcpfzFh

#BookSky #SkyStorians

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@dbellingradt.bsky.socialOct 5, 2026, 7:56 AM

The lost days of paper marketing and rumors about an event. #skystorians

@ijhs.bsky.socialOct 5, 2026, 7:56 AM

#skystorians 🗃️ #sporthistory

📍New article!

"From Autonomy to Aggrandizement: A Comparative History of Executive Power, Corruption, and Democratic Backsliding in International Sport Federations"

by Anthony Nakhle from Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth 🇱🇧

Check it out: t.co/Isb0leGnUF

@iduhouse.bsky.socialOct 5, 2026, 5:11 AM

🎨 Artist of the Day: Skunder Boghossian

Skunder Boghossian bridged traditional Ethiopian art with modern expression. His work blended ancient symbols, spirituality, and surrealism to tell stories of identity and liberation that transcended time.

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #BlackSky #Art

Black-and-white archival photograph of Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian leaning over a worktable, brush or drawing tool in his right hand, looking directly toward the camera. Paintings crowd the studio around him: elongated women with large almond-shaped eyes, stylized faces, potted plants, and framed works stacked against walls and furniture. A large seated female figure rises behind his right shoulder; at lower right is The Union, dated 1964. The photographer is unknown, and the image survives in the National Archives’ Hampton Foundation Collection. It catches Boghossian during the period when his art was changing most dramatically. Born in Addis Ababa in 1937 to an Ethiopian mother and Armenian father, he left Ethiopia on a government scholarship in 1955, studied in London, then moved to Paris in 1957. There he spent as much time in museums, cafés, jazz clubs, and artists’ studios as in formal classrooms. Daily study at the Musée de l’Homme exposed him to African sculpture and masks; conversations with Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop, and artists across the African diaspora pulled him toward Négritude and Pan-African thought. Surrealism offered another language for dreams, metamorphosis, and the unseen. Boghossian did not choose between those worlds. He began building a visual language in which Ethiopian church painting, healing scrolls, West African forms, modernism, jazz, literature, memory, and spirit could coexist. The portraits surrounding him still belong partly to his earlier figurative period, but their stretched bodies and mask-like faces already point toward the cosmic beings of his 1964 works. The photograph therefore captures more than an artist at a table. It shows a young African modernist learning how to make inherited traditions and global encounters speak to one another without allowing either to become a cage. That refusal of a single lineage would define the rest of his career. The studio already maps an emerging language.Skunder Boghossian’s Night Flight of Dread and Delight, 1964, is a dark cosmology of two winged creatures rising through a field of stars, circles, blue, gray, rust, and orange forms. One creature has a wide-eyed catlike face; another suggests an owl. Their bodies seem assembled from armor, masks, talismans, bones, feathers, planets, and constellations. A horizontal boundary separates earth from the heavens, but the beings cross it. Boghossian made the painting after years in Paris, immersed in Surrealism, Pan-African intellectual circles, African art, and the work of artists including Wifredo Lam and Roberto Matta. In 1964 he flew to the United States to marry Marilyn Pryce, a civil rights activist from Tuskegee, Alabama. The transatlantic flight was violently turbulent, and Boghossian transformed that fear into a meditation on crossing worlds. He completed Night Flight in Alabama only months after the Civil Rights Act was signed. The painting carries the anxiety of flight, the Black Atlantic, African spiritual systems, Ethiopian healing scrolls, and the supernatural storytelling of Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola. Boghossian called his emerging philosophy “Afro-metaphysics,” using myth and spirit not as nostalgia but as tools for imagining Black existence beyond colonial categories. The owl and catlike beings also echo the dream-monsters of Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, but Boghossian redirects Surrealism through African cosmologies and diasporic memory. The work is neither purely European Surrealism nor an illustration of one African tradition. Its power comes from the collision. Fear becomes flight; history becomes cosmos; inherited symbols become new worlds. Decades later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art included Night Flight in Surrealism Beyond Borders, recognizing what the painting had already insisted in 1964: modernism’s unconscious was never confined to Europe. The crossing becomes personal and diasporic, historical and metaphysical at once.Black-and-white archival photo of Skunder Boghossian standing and smiling in a crowded studio beside paintings, drawings, portfolios, brushes, and sculptures. He wears a dark buttoned shirt and light trousers. At far left is the painting Subterranean Confidence; behind the large black portfolio rises Stele, a carved wooden sculpture from 1964. Sketches are pinned to the wall and works lean across the floor, making the studio a laboratory for image, object, symbol, and material. The photographer is unknown; the image comes from the National Archives’ Hampton Foundation Collection. It comes from the mid-1960s, when Boghossian’s practice moved decisively beyond the figurative portraits of his earlier Paris years. He studied African objects repeatedly at Paris’s Musée de l’Homme, as works carrying specific cultural and spiritual knowledge. He absorbed Négritude and Pan-African ideas through figures such as Aimé Césaire and Cheikh Anta Diop. And he exchanged ideas with African and diasporic artists, including Ivorian sculptor Christian Lattier, whose fiber-wrapped figures demonstrated that the supernatural could inhabit modern form. The objects around him make that experimentation visible. Painting alone was not enough; sculpture, collage, drawing, pattern, literature, and spiritual research could all feed the same language. After returning to Ethiopia in 1966, he traveled to historic sites, studied rock-hewn churches, crosses, icons, and healing scrolls, and taught at the School of Fine Arts in Addis Ababa. In the United States, he carried that method into Howard University, teaching for nearly three decades and mentoring generations of artists, including members of the Ethiopian diaspora. This photograph catches the principle before the long teaching legacy: culture is not a museum specimen. For Boghossian it was material to study deeply, transform responsibly, and keep alive through invention. At Howard, that method became a living diasporic lineage.Skunder Boghossian’s Ju-Ju’s Wedding, 1964, is a dense field of rust red, orange, gray, black, cream, and metallic tones. Two mask-like figures dominate the lower half, with circular red-ringed eyes and faces built from stripes, zigzags, dots, triangles, and layered fragments. Around them crowd hornlike curves, disks, bands, geometric emblems, and partly hidden forms, making the surface feel ceremonial and in motion. Boghossian made the work with tempera and metallic paint on cut-and-torn cardboard, turning cardboard into something resembling a talisman, icon, collage, and cosmic map. In 1964 he held a successful solo exhibition at Galerie Lambert in Paris, traveled to the United States, and married Marilyn Pryce in Tuskegee, Alabama. A cluster of works from that year, including Night Flight of Dread and Delight, Ju-Ju’s Wedding, Ju-Ju’s Wedding Feast, and Ju-Ju Celebrates, developed what he called “Afro-metaphysics.” “Juju” became his shorthand for a spiritual language that could connect Ethiopian Orthodox imagery, healing scrolls, West African religious forms, Surrealism, Pan-African thought, and his own diasporic experience without pretending those traditions were identical. The title is both intimate and metaphysical: personal union becomes a gathering of ancestral forces. The cut cardboard and repeated marks recall the structure of Ethiopian protective scrolls, objects designed to place image, writing, and spiritual power in relation. Yet Boghossian was not reproducing a traditional scroll. He was inventing a modern visual system from many inheritances. MoMA acquired Ju-Ju’s Wedding soon after it was made, making Boghossian the first contemporary African artist represented in its collection. The milestone matters, but the work makes the stronger statement. At a moment when African modernism was often treated as peripheral to Western art history, Boghossian placed Africa, diaspora, spirit, and experiment at the center of modernity itself. That claim still lands.
@aaronm.bsky.socialOct 5, 2026, 12:00 AM

4 #Manuscripts this week from #Vatican
www.wiglaf.org/vatican/2026...
One Avvisi for 1644/5, one polyphonic Antiophonal, Petrus de Tarentasia on the Sentences and Petri Lopez de Ayala's "Tractatus de Aritus Zapacibus" (whatever that is)
#MedievalSky #Skystorians

@eicathomefinn.bsky.socialOct 4, 2026, 1:58 PM

'Never a theoretician, Iliffe was a man of the field, analysing all that he saw and experienced. His work was regarded internationally as the model of what engaged research should be, in a way that would be difficult to sustain today.' #Skystorians

@writersofwrongs.bsky.socialOct 4, 2026, 1:04 PM

#OTD (Oct 04) in 1951, Guarino "Willie Moore" #Moretti is shot to death during a friendly chat with underworld colleagues at a #CliffsideParkNJ restaurant.

www.writersofwrongs....

#MafiaHistory #History #Skystorians

@eicathomefinn.bsky.socialOct 4, 2026, 12:32 PM

Lots of useful information & links to key resources for #Skystorians, but NB the Enslavement Registers did not make the records of 4 million enslave people searchable to the public: that was done by Ancestry partnered with UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery historians.

@www.joditaylorbooks.comOct 4, 2026, 10:32 AM

Richard III: villain or victim of Tudor propaganda? #JodiTaylorBooks #History #skystorians www.joditaylorbooks....

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@janalena.bsky.socialOct 4, 2026, 8:30 AM

Super fun @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social interview with @leafyhistory.bsky.social about @reaktionbooks.bsky.social Creatures of Story and Song: Tracing #Britain 's Lost Species #skystorians #folklore #NaturalHistory

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@kefauver4prez.bsky.socialOct 3, 2026, 10:50 PM

That's what I call a winning smile!

Kefauver posing for one of a series of pictures for Life magazine in May 1952, during his first Presidential campaign. Not sure why they had him pose with the radio.

#skystorians #history #polisky

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@iduhouse.bsky.socialOct 3, 2026, 10:33 PM

✨ Artist of the Day: Mickalene Thomas

Through rhinestones, color, and collage, Mickalene Thomas reimagines beauty & power. Portraits celebrate Black femininity and self-definition, reclaiming the gaze with confidence and glamour.

mickalene.herokuapp.com

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #BlackSky #Art

Portrait of Mickalene Thomas seated against a dense botanical backdrop, wearing a black blazer and black top, dark trousers, and oversized translucent glasses. Her locs fall over her shoulders; one arm rests loosely on the back of a wooden chair while she faces camera with a steady gaze. Ferns, trailing leaves, and dark star-veined foliage fill nearly every inch behind her, turning the portrait into a meeting between the artist and the lush interiors that recur throughout her work. Born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1971, Thomas came to art later. In Portland in the 1990s, seeing Carrie Mae Weems's work gave her something she had not often encountered in museums: a Black woman using her own life, body, and community as serious artistic materials. Thomas went on to Pratt and Yale, where photographing herself and her mother, Sandra Bush, changed the direction of her practice. Her portraits would become a counter-history to the Western canon, placing Black women, especially queer Black women, friends, lovers, family, and muses, at the center of images associated with beauty, leisure, sexuality, and power. Domestic space matters just as much as the sitter. Thomas builds rooms with patterned upholstery, houseplants, wood paneling, mirrors, wallpaper, and objects that echo the New Jersey interiors of her childhood, then photographs those spaces and reworks them through collage, paint, rhinestones, film, and installation. By 2024, her first major international touring retrospective, All About Love, was carrying more than two decades of that practice from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, London, Toulouse, and finally Paris's Grand Palais, where it closed in 2026. This portrait therefore reads almost like a quiet key to the whole project. Thomas sits inside abundance without being swallowed by it. The plants frame her, but her gaze controls the image. In a career devoted to who gets to look, who gets looked at, and who gets to define beauty, she occupies the center on her own terms.Mickalene Thomas's Afro Goddess Looking Forward, 2015, is a self-portrait of the artist reclining on a couch amid dense domestic patterns. Thomas wears a green floral robe; one bent knee rises toward the foreground while cushions in black-and-white animal print, orange flowers, and clashing textiles surround her. Her face is built from flat brown paint, rhinestones, and a rectangular black-and-white photograph of her own eyes pasted across the painted face. A large sparkling Afro forms a dark halo around her head. Behind her, panels of purple, green, cream, tan, and floral imagery overlap like wallpaper, fabric swatches, photographs layered into one room. The glamorous pose carries art history with it. Thomas has repeatedly returned to the odalisque, the reclining female body used by painters such as Ingres, Manet, and Matisse for beauty, fantasy, exoticism, and male desire. Here the artist becomes both maker and muse. A Black queer woman does not enter the composition as servant, anonymous model, or object offered to someone else's gaze. She looks back. The photographed eyes make that confrontation literal, inserting a living stare into the constructed body. Thomas's method often begins with a staged photograph in a set she builds herself, then moves through collage before becoming a mixed-media painting. Rhinestones became part of her vocabulary for glamour, masking, adornment, labor, and visibility. The work carries a personal lineage. Thomas began photographing herself and her mother, Sandra Bush, at Yale, learning that portraiture could become an exchange between sitter and artist rather than an act of possession. Decades later, her All About Love retrospective placed this self-portrait inside an argument about Black women claiming not just representation, but pleasure, rest, desire, self-fashioning, and love. The goddess in the title is not distant mythology. She is the artist, seated in her own visual world and determining the terms on which we may enter it.Mickalene Thomas poses in her Brooklyn studio in 2019, photographed by Dana Scruggs for Town & Country. She sits wide-legged on a rolling chair in a loose white shirt, emerald-green trousers, glasses, and white sneakers, one arm raised across her forehead. Behind her lean two mixed-media works of Black women drawn from vintage magazines. Faces combine painting and black-and-white photography; skin is interrupted by pixel-like color blocks, while rhinestones, glitter, and collage crowd the canvases. The portrait catches an old archive becoming new material. On a studio table were stacks of Jet magazines and calendars she had found in New Orleans. Their pages included Black female pinups circulated through a commercial gaze and censorship. Thomas scanned, enlarged, cut apart, and recontextualized those images. She was asking who controlled how these women were seen, what changes when their bodies move from magazine page to monumental painting, and whether an image made for consumption can be reclaimed as a site of agency. The investigation expanded through June 1976 and her Jet-inspired Beyond the Pleasure Principle paintings, where pixelated blocks hide, reveal, or fragment bodies while women's eyes remain present. The photograph also captures another shift. Thomas was preparing Better Nights for Miami's Bass Museum, an immersive project descended from Better Days, her 2013 Art Basel installation inspired by parties her mother Sandra Bush hosted in 1970s New Jersey. Thomas wanted museums to feel less like elite rooms and more like spaces for music, leisure, and community. That impulse still runs through her practice. Her All About Love retrospective transformed galleries with domestic interiors, sounds, seating, plants, and monumental portraits, asking viewers to inhabit the world around the pictures rather than stand at a distance. The relaxed pose here is deceptive: behind it sits a serious project about access, archive, pleasure, and who gets to command the image.Mickalene Thomas's Portrait of Mnonja, 2010, shows a Black woman reclining across a riotously patterned couch in complete command. Mnonja wears a white blouse edged in red, deep blue velvet trousers, pink-red glittering heels, large earrings and gold jewelry. One arm stretches along the sofa while her legs extend left. She looks outward, composed and self-possessed. The interior is lush: floral cushions, black-and-white fabric, orange and cream patterns, striped walls, wood paneling, and rhinestones compete for attention. Thomas covered clothing, makeup, hair, jewelry, and shoes with sparkling stones, a material associated more with craft stores than museum painting. That collision is part of the point. Thomas makes decoration, femininity, fashion, and domestic taste monumental. The reclining pose reaches back through centuries of Western painting, especially the odalisque tradition and works such as Manet's Olympia, where women were arranged for a presumed male viewer and Black women often appeared as servants. Here the Black woman is the center, source of glamour, and person controlling the encounter. Thomas has said that beauty has always been a subject of debate around Black women, whether Black women were allowed to lead that conversation. Her answer is not one ideal of beauty. It is agency. Mnonja was one of the women Thomas photographed in sets built from retro textiles, furniture, plants, and objects designed to create trust between artist and muse. Photography becomes collage; collage becomes painting; a private pose becomes public art history. The Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired Portrait of Mnonja in 2011, placing this rhinestone-covered vision of Black female leisure inside the national collection. She reclines, but never becomes passive. Thomas's later All About Love retrospective made the larger argument explicit: rest, pleasure, style, desire, and self-possession are not decorative side notes to Black life. They are worthy subjects of history.
@adamchapman.bsky.socialOct 3, 2026, 7:15 PM

Gwych!

Fantastic to see this resource (a massive corpus of 15th century Welsh poetry) back again. #HanesCymru #Skystorians

@glmasson.bsky.socialOct 3, 2026, 2:23 PM

FINALLY! Regained access to my account after months of website issues! #skystorians #history

@mobhistory.substack.comOct 3, 2026, 1:03 PM

#OTD (Oct 03)
Events in U.S. organized crime #history.

#Brooklyn #BuffaloNY #Detroit #FortLeeNJ #Chicago #Florida #NewYork #Mafia #MafiaHistory 🗃️ #Skystorians

On this date, Oct 03... • in 1903, Joseph Valachi is born Giuseppe Vilacio in New York City. • in 1905, Vito Laduca is arrested in Baltimore in connection with a Brooklyn NY kidnapping. • in 1912, Harlem racketeer Aniello Prisco is arrested for the Sept. 3 killings of Tony Zaccaro and Giuseppe Jacco. • in 1914, Monk Eastman is arrested for vagrancy in Buffalo NY, and a city court orders him to leave the community. • in 1921, arriving in New York traffic court on a speeding charge, Joseph 'Joe Peppe' Viserti is recognized as a homicide suspect and charged with the killing of Joseph Lagumina. • in 1931, Elmer Macklin is arrested in Detroit for the murder of Chester LaMare. • in 1951, the Fort Lee NJ chief of police is indicted for failing to investigate gambling complaints against Willie Moretti and Joe Adonis. • in 1962, a federal jury acquits Chicago underworld leader Tony Accardo of tax fraud. • in 1973, Salvatore Anastasio, Catholic priest and author of a book about his murdered brother Albert Anastasia, passes away in Italy. • in 2008, a federal jury convicts Vincent Artuso and three south Florida associates of racketeering and other charges. Image of Tony Accardo.