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@johannagranville.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 3:11 PM

That head topped a monument built in 1951 where the Regnum Marianum church stood. Consecrated in 1931, the church honored Hungary’s liberation from Béla Kun’s 1919 regime. On Oct 23, 1956, welders cut Stalin off at the knees. More: academic.oup.com/book/63217 #Hungary1956 #Skystorians

@johannagranville.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 3:06 PM

Yes. Doubt reached Soviet communists too. In a closed nuclear city, Ozyorsk, Urals region, physicist Anatolii Lanin asked why the Hungarian workers' demands were hidden: "Our enemies know everything. But we, the friends, know very little." More: academic.oup.com/book/63217 #Hungary1956 #Skystorians

@johannagranville.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 3:03 PM

What a journey! Most Hungarian refugees crossed first into Austria, which granted asylum on Oct 28, 1956, while Imre Nagy was still prime minister. Among the first to flee were ÁVH secret police agents, escaping lynch mobs. More in my book: academic.oup.com/book/63217 #Hungary1956 #Skystorians

@johannagranville.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 2:58 PM

A wonderful project. Exile ran both ways in 1956. Hungarian students in Moscow feared they could not go home. László Szamuely recalled: "we were citizens of a country that was at war with the Soviet Union." More in my book: academic.oup.com/book/63217 #Hungary1956 #Skystorians

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@johannagranville.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 2:52 PM

Interesting point. 1956 sharpened that view where Soviet troops were visible: the slogan “Russians go home” rang loudest in Eastern Europe (e.g. Timișoara). In the Soviet core, many students still spoke of “our tanks.” I compare both in my book: academic.oup.com/book/63217 #Hungary1956 #Skystorians

@johannagranville.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 2:33 PM

The Berlin link is real. Ulbricht used the Hungarian crisis to win firmer backing from Khrushchev, setting the stage for the Wall four and a half years later. More in my new book, Tremors in the Soviet Bloc: academic.oup.com/book/63217 #Hungary1956 #Skystorians #history

@johannagranville.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 2:30 PM

Good point. Ironically, probably most Soviet students in Moscow and Leningrad who protested the intervention in 1956 were not anti-communists. Groups like Krasilnikov’s Union of Communists-Leninists wanted a return to “Leninist ideals.” More: academic.oup.com/book/63217 #Hungary1956 #Skystorians

@johannagranville.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 2:25 PM

Beautifully put. When Naum Korzhavin heard of the Soviet intervention on Nov 4, 1956, he made Hope the speaker of his poem: it rose up “only once, in Budapest,” then faded, and “since then, I do not live.” His poem opens a chapter of my book: academic.oup.com/book/63217 #Hungary1956 #Skystorians

@mobhistory.substack.comOct 17, 2026, 2:17 PM

#OTD (Oct 17)
Events in U.S. organized crime #history.

#BuffaloNY #NewKensingtonPA #Pittsburgh #Milwaukee #StatenIsland #Brooklyn #Chicago #ToledoOH #BinghamtonNY #Miami #NorthCarolina #LosAngeles #Philadelphia #NewYork #Mafia #MafiaHistory 🗃️ #Skystorians

On this date, Oct 17... • in 1873, future Buffalo crime boss Giuseppe DiCarlo is born in Vallelunga, Sicily. • in 1911, Giuseppe Costabile of Manhattan is sentenced to 3.5 to 7 seven years in prison for violating Sullivan Law. • in 1924, John Bazzano of New Kensington PA and Dominic Cimino of Pittsburgh are charged with conspiring in the theft of whiskey from a government warehouse. • in 1926, Peter and Angelo Guardalabene of Milwaukee are charged with Prohibition violations. • in 1929, Salvatore 'Charlie Luciano' Lucania is found severely beaten and bleeding on Staten Island. • in 1930, Brooklyn grape merchant Giovanni Anselmo is shot and mortally wounded. • in 1931, Chicago crime boss Al Capone is convicted of income tax evasion. • in 1946, convicted protection racketeer James Licavoli of Toledo OH is granted parole after less than a year of his 1 to 5-year sentence. • in 1956, regional Mafia leaders meet in Binghamton NY. • in 1963, Frank Rosenthal is arrested in Miami FL on a fugitive warrant from North Carolina. • in 1972, Eddie Coco is sentenced in Miami FL to 15 years for conspiracy, extortion and loansharking. • in 1980, Aladena Fratianno testifies about the murder of Frank Bompensiero by Los Angeles mafiosi. • in 2018, Joey Merlino, ex-boss of the Philadelphia Mafia, is sentenced two years in prison for gambling. Image of Al Capone.
@laurajcleaver.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 10:51 AM

On 12 November we’re holding a workshop in London @ies-sas.bsky.social on the making of The Bayeux Tapestry and how ideas about its creation have changed over time, with the chance to have a go at embroidery. Places are limited, book 👇🧵🪡 #MedievalSky #Skystorians

www.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

sas.ac.ukMaking and Remaking the Bayeux Tapestry
@ideasroadshow.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 10:08 AM

A jug in the shape of a bronze leopard with a small hinged lid in its head, Nigeria.

Looted from the Royal Palace in Benin City during the British Expedition in 1897, now in British Museum 🏛️

🗃️ #arthistory #skystorians 🏺 #archaeology #museum #caturday #cats

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@yorkisthistory.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 9:36 AM

And we’re off! Today the YHT is hosting a conference at the @warburginstitute.bsky.social showcasing the work and research we’ve supported over the past few years. We begin with an introduction from our chairman, Dr Christian Steer 📚 #MedievalSky #Skystorians

Photograph of Christian Steer standing at a lectern introducing the conference.
@downham.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 9:21 AM

Currently listening #skystorians #classics shows.acast.com/6467b7de03f4...

@kefauver4prez.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 1:25 AM

Can't stop for lunch - gotta keep campaigning!

Kefauver shakes hands at a lunch counter in Washington, DC ahead of the primary in June 1952.

#skystorians #history #polisky

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@iduhouse.bsky.socialOct 17, 2026, 12:10 AM

📸 Artist of the Day: Trevor Stuurman

Trevor Stuurman captures the modern African identity through vibrant color and intimate storytelling. His images celebrate style, culture, and self-expression, turning everyday life into fine art.

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #BlackSky #BlackSkyArt #Art

A tightly framed color portrait of a Black man posed frontally against a bold black-and-white backdrop whose sweeping stripes resemble zebra markings. He wears round dark sunglasses, a black cylindrical hat decorated with small metallic figures, a crisp white shirt, and a silvery gray outer garment densely covered with embroidered patches. Both hands hold a small silver-and-black camera at the center of his chest. The pose is calm and deliberate: photographer, camera and patterned background are stacked almost symmetrically, turning the act of looking into part of the picture. This photograph was published as “Self-Portrait (1)” in connection with Trevor Stuurman’s 2022 exhibition Life Through the Lens at Doyle Wham in Shoreditch, London, his first solo exhibition outside South Africa. The show, open May 13 to July 2, gathered carefully styled and staged self-portraits made across his career, with each image tied to a personal or professional milestone. Stuurman used clothing, props and constructed backdrops not as decoration alone, but as tools for deciding how a Black African subject would be seen. That approach also places the work in conversation with African studio portrait traditions. The exhibition explicitly cited Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, whose portraits made patterned interiors, clothing, stance and self-presentation central to authorship. Stuurman carries that lineage into a contemporary image saturated with fashion and self-fashioning. The camera is especially important: it makes image-making visible inside the image itself, placing authorship in plain sight. Rather than disappearing behind the lens, the creator places the apparatus in front of us and turns self-portraiture into a statement about who gets to frame, style, archive and celebrate Black life.Two Black women sit side by side on grass in a dark, leafy garden, posed with the stillness and ceremony of a formal portrait. At left, one wears a towering black-and-white striped headwrap, narrow white sunglasses, layered beadwork and metal adornment across her neck and partly exposed torso, and a vivid red plaid textile wrapped around her lower body. At right, the second figure wears dark sunglasses, red lipstick, an angular printed headpiece and a dramatic full-length ensemble in saturated blue, red, orange and white. Its fitted patterned bodice opens into a huge circular skirt that spreads across the foreground like a textile landscape. Dense green foliage behind them makes the colors appear even brighter. Style Rave included this image in a May 2018 portfolio drawn from Trevor Stuurman’s Instagram presence, but the surviving article does not supply an individual title, date, location, sitter names, designer credits or a separate photographer credit for this frame. That absence matters. Stuurman works across photography, styling and creative direction, often in collaboration, so an Instagram-source credit is not enough to assign every role with confidence. What can be read securely is the visual language. The image treats dress, adornment, pattern and pose as architecture for identity rather than accessories around it. It belongs to the period when Stuurman’s practice was increasingly moving beyond street-style documentation into highly constructed fashion imagery and art photography. He has described his larger aim as showing contemporary Africa in the present tense and placing Black subjects in elevated, highly stylized spaces that older image archives often denied them. This frame does that: two subjects occupy the center with composure and scale, while clothing becomes a means of world-building. Because the original credits remain unresolved, the specific cultural origins of the beadwork, textiles and headwraps should not be guessed from appearance alone.Low-angle fashion portrait against a cloudless blue sky. A Black figure leans slightly forward with eyes lowered behind narrow white visor-like sunglasses. On the head are two stacked felt cylindrical hats, mint green below and soft pink above, with a large cobalt-blue hoop earring visible at one side. The body is wrapped in pale and hot pink: a tailored jacket is almost overtaken by sculptural folds, pleats and fan-shaped ruffles that bloom across the chest and shoulders. The strong blocks of pink, mint, blue and white make the figure read almost like a piece of graphic design suspended against the sky. This image comes from Ses’fikile, the 2017 lookbook for Johannesburg millinery label Simon and Mary’s FEZ collection. Crucially, the photography was credited to Simphiwe Mkhwanazi, not Trevor Stuurman. Stuurman served as assistant and co-creative director with Dear Ribane. That distinction is part of the story: his practice has never been limited to pressing the shutter. He builds images through styling, location, casting, collaboration and visual direction. The collection emerged after Stuurman visited the Simon and Mary factory and noticed a fez sample made from blocks the family business had owned since the late 1980s. The brand developed the release around vivid red, mint, yellow, pink, blue and black, drawing inspiration from the color and beadwork of Northern Ndebele visual culture. Stuurman said the silhouette of Ndebele bracelets reminded him of the fez and felt like a route toward a new translation rather than a literal reproduction. The lookbook itself was intentionally improvised. Stuurman recalled sending references to the team, meeting early the next day, driving around Johannesburg and finding a location together. The result makes collaboration visible: inherited millinery tools, contemporary styling and South African design language recombined into an image that feels futuristic without severing itself from lineage.A theatrical fashion tableau staged outdoors among trees. At left, a Black man stands beneath a large orange parasol printed with dark branching motifs. He wears a sharply tailored suit in the same fiery orange-and-black textile, a patterned cap and a narrow white futuristic eye covering. At right, a Black woman stands taller in a monumental high-neck gown made from matching fabric. The dress expands into enormous sculptural forms at the hips and sleeves before cascading to the ground; white gloves and another angular white eye piece sharpen the futuristic effect. A silvery gray cloth backdrop has been hung behind them, deliberately inserting the language of the photo studio into the woods. The image belongs to Trevor Stuurman’s 2018 visual response to Marvel Studios’ Black Panther, published by i-D as part of a project asking five artists to interpret the film and its Afrofuturist themes. i-D credits the photography jointly to Trevor Stuurman and Obakeng Molepe, costume design to Stuurman and Manthe Ribane, and creative direction to Stuurman. Rather than simply reproducing Wakanda, Stuurman built his own future-facing Africa through fashion. He said the project was inspired by the power of women in African history and described the continent as a “creative furnace.” In a longer project statement circulated at the time, the orange batik represented the fire of Africa and Africans, while the principal gown’s expanding silhouette was conceived as a volcano. That symbolism changes how the scene reads: the figures are not dressed for a fictional future imposed from elsewhere. Fabric, silhouette, landscape and posture imagine futurity as something authored from within Africa. The photograph also captures a key expansion in Stuurman’s practice. Fashion photography becomes set design, costume language and cultural argument at once, with collaboration kept visible in the credits.
@footnotesinhistory.bsky.socialOct 16, 2026, 8:45 PM

A photograph of Japanese American men building barracks at the Topaz incarceration camp. WRA caption: "Topaz, Utah. Young volunteer workers of Japanese parentage haul lumber for the construction of barracks and interiors at he Topaz Relocation Center." Taken on October 16, 1942.
🗃 #skystorians #OTD

Found in the Densho Digital Repository
@iduhouse.bsky.socialOct 16, 2026, 8:01 PM

🎨 Artist of the Day: Ernest Mancoba

A pioneer of African modernism, Ernest Mancoba’s art blended spirituality, abstraction and identity. Working in exile, he sought freedom through form, creating pieces that spoke to human dignity and depth.

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #BlackSky #BlackSkyArt #Art

Black-and-white portrait of Ernest Mancoba in later life, photographed by Peter Johansen in 1986. Mancoba sits indoors in a dark beret, herringbone tweed jacket, dark sweater vest, crisp white shirt and tie. Light enters from the left, catching the planes and deep lines of his face as he looks past the camera with a furrowed, searching expression. A doorway or window frame cuts through the shadowy background. At the bottom edge, his hands hold folded eyeglasses and part of a newspaper, giving the formal portrait the feeling of a quiet moment interrupted. Art historians Karen Kurczynski and Nicola Pezolet identify this as Johansen’s 1986 portrait, made in a period when Mancoba, long based in France, was visiting Denmark to work on lithographs with Johansen. The Ferlov Mancoba archive preserves correspondence from Atelier Litografisk inviting him to work there and suggests this stay may have marked his move into lithography after earlier woodcuts. There is another layer just beyond this crop. In the wider published photograph, Mancoba’s sideways glance falls toward Alberto Giacometti’s bronze Spoon Woman, a work shaped by Giacometti’s own encounter with West African carved forms. Mancoba had known Giacometti during his early Paris years, when his own thinking about African art and European modernism was changing rapidly. The visual encounter is powerful because Mancoba spent much of his career resisting a history that eagerly celebrated African influence while too often marginalizing African modernists themselves. Here he is simply present: composed, observant, intellectually alert and still making work nearly half a century after leaving South Africa. That quiet visibility feels different now: Mancoba has since become the subject of major institutional reassessments, and the Ferlov Mancoba Foundation launched a digital catalogue raisonné in 2025 to reconstruct the record of an oeuvre that history had only partially preserved.Black-and-white archival photograph of Ernest Mancoba’s Faith, carved in wood in 1936. The small sculpture stands alone on a rectangular base against a pale, nearly empty backdrop. Its surface is dark, rough and visibly worked rather than polished smooth. A larger human form rises vertically like a compact column, built from broad rounded masses. Nested against its front is a smaller childlike body and face, tilted upward toward the larger figure, so mother and child seem less like separate bodies than forms growing into and through one another. Simplified limbs, compressed anatomy and visible carving marks give the work both physical weight and tenderness. Faith survives through photographs, including this image first published in Johannesburg’s The Star on June 8, 1936; the sculpture’s current whereabouts and dimensions are unknown. It belongs to a pivotal turn in Mancoba’s South African practice. After learning woodcarving at Grace Dieu and becoming known for more naturalistic figurative sculpture, he encountered reproductions of West and Central African sculpture in a book recommended by Cape Town modernist Lippy Lipshitz. That encounter helped open a route toward geometric simplification and a modernism he could define for himself. The timing matters. In 1936 South Africa’s Department of Native Affairs also offered Mancoba work making saleable animal souvenirs for the Empire Exhibition. He ultimately refused. Faith was not made as an illustration of that refusal, but it comes from the same moment in which he was pushing against colonial ideas about what a Black artist should make and for whom. Here resemblance is no longer the whole point. Volume, rhythm, compression and the relationship between two bodies carry the feeling. Scholar Joshua I. Cohen calls Faith Mancoba’s first modernist sculpture. The surviving image lets us watch an artist beginning to claim formal freedom before Europe ever entered the story.Black-and-white photograph of Ernest Mancoba working in a studio in Gudhjem on the Danish island of Bornholm in summer 1951, photographed by Johnny Bonne. Mancoba stands slightly hunched over a crowded worktable, wearing a dark beret and sleeveless sweater over a white collared shirt. His eyes are lowered toward a small palette or board held carefully in both hands. Brushes, containers and working materials fill the table below him. At right, a rounded wooden sculpture by Mancoba rises close to the camera; behind him hangs one of his paintings, organized through broad geometric and block-like forms. The photograph places painting and sculpture in the same room, surrounding the artist as living parts of his practice. The image was made for a newspaper feature about artists working on Bornholm that summer. Ernest and his wife, Danish sculptor Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, were spending time in Gudhjem near the end of the five years they had lived in Denmark after World War II. Through friends including Asger Jorn and Ejler Bille, Mancoba had become involved with the Høst exhibition circle and the CoBrA milieu. CoBrA’s official life lasted only from 1948 to 1951, so this photograph catches him at the edge of both a place and an art-historical moment. That context is complicated. Mancoba later described feeling marginalized within those circles, where enthusiasm for non-Western art could coexist with resistance to a Black South African artist speaking as an equal modernist. Bonne’s photograph cuts through that abstraction. We see Mancoba doing the work: handling materials, studying a surface, surrounded by objects he made. After this Bornholm summer, the family returned to France. The image therefore reads almost like a threshold, but not an ending. It shows a creator whose language cannot be reduced to “African,” “European” or “CoBrA,” because all three labels are smaller than the practice happening in the room.Color image of Ernest Mancoba’s Komposition, also known as Composition, painted in Paris in 1940 in oil on canvas. The roughly vertical work is dense and symmetrical without becoming rigid. At the top, nested diamonds and polygonal bands read almost like a head or mask. Below, sharp red, blue, ochre, cream, green and brown chevrons stack and open outward around a central axis. Curved striped passages suggest eyes, arms, wings or ornament, while the lower half gathers into another diamond above dark triangular forms. Thick, direct brushwork keeps the geometry alive: edges wobble, colors overlap and the image seems to shift between a human presence and an abstract structure. The current Ernest Mancoba catalogue raisonné records the work as Komposition, 1940, oil on canvas, 59.5 by 49.5 centimeters, private collection. MoMA scholar Joshua I. Cohen identifies it as Mancoba’s first painting on canvas, following the nonobjective works on paper he made after arriving in Europe. Here he brings the human figure back, but reorganizes it through abstraction. Scholars have linked the painting’s frontal structure, diamonds and chevrons to Kuba masking traditions from the Congo region, particularly the Mbwoom helmet mask. Mancoba had studied African works and reproductions in South Africa and visited the British Museum’s African collections on his way to Paris; the precise model remains an art-historical interpretation rather than a documented one-to-one copy. That distinction matters. This is an African modernist authoring his own synthesis, not simply supplying “influence” to Europe. Composition predates CoBrA by eight years, challenging the habit of explaining Mancoba mainly through that later movement. The language is already here: figure becoming sign, symmetry disrupted by the hand, and African form participating from inside the making of modern art.
@feegiconference.bsky.socialOct 16, 2026, 7:28 PM

Boosting this as the Nov. 1 deadline for these two $1000 research grants is approaching! #earlymodern #globalhistory #skystorians

FForum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions (FEEGI)@feegiconference.bsky.socialAug 18, 2026, 7:54 PM

Call for applications: FEEGI RESEARCH AWARDS - we will award two $1000 research grants to support travel to archival or other field sites. This award is open to all FEEGI members, but is intended especially for graduate students, independent scholars, and untenured faculty. feegi.org/awards.html

feegi.orgAwardsApplication deadline Nov. 1, 2026 Recognizing the significant material and financial challenges inherent in multi-sited studies, FEEGI will award two research grants of $1000 each to support travel...
@gemmahauthor.bsky.socialOct 16, 2026, 6:20 PM

My Just History Posts 10 year anniversary event is tomorrow! justhistoryposts.com/events/

I thought I'd share a bit more information about the wonderful line up of historians who will be chatting away about their craft... 🧵

#history #events #historians #skystorians

An event poster with a grey background. The text reads: Just History Posts' 10th Anniversary. Saturday 17th October 4pm BST. An online event celebrating history bloggers. Hear what it takes to found and run a history website, and where the future of historical blogging may be. Learn more at justhistoryposts.com. There are 5 headshots of those taking part in the event: Gemma Hollman, Amy Boucher, Sharon Bennett Connolly, Rebecca Larson and Tamise Hills.