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@laurajcleaver.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 2:07 PM

If you’d like to know more about the impact of 1066 in England, on 12 November Mark Hagger will be giving a much more nuanced lecture. Book now 👇 #Skystorians
www.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

@robertsmartino.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 1:02 PM

Can anyone help me decipher what I think is a name, please? The quote says 'responsiones domini [?] [?] curati de Dachett ad articulos predictos'. #skystorians #PalaeographyPuzzle

@adamchapman.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 10:58 AM

Available now: new draft text on some of the (very many), medieval religious foundations, including the chapel of Exeter castle; Benedictine foundations including the nuns of Polsloe; a host of hospitals, almshouses and minster churches and much, much more.

#MedievalSky #Skystorians

@vch-home.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 10:54 AM

The work in Devon is one of of FIVE (5) new projects for us, in Devon, Dorset, London, Kent, and Lincolnshire. For more, please see this blog post from our Co-General Editor, @ruthslatter.bsky.social.

#MedievalSky #Skystorians #LocalHistory

@mobhistory.substack.com Oct 9, 2026, 10:15 AM

#OTD (Oct 09)
Events in U.S. organized crime #history.

#Detroit #KansasCity #Chicago #NewOrleans #Brooklyn #Philadelphia #Massachusetts #NewYork #Mafia #MafiaHistory 🗃️ #Skystorians

On this date, Oct 09...
• in 1911, reputed Black Hand gangster Giuseppe Costabile goes on trial in New York City for carrying a bomb.
• in 1913, Vito Adamo and Filippo Buccellato are brought to trial in Detroit for the murder of Carlo Callego.
• in 1918, brothers Peter and Joseph DiGiovanni are arrested for murder, but the charges are soon dropped.
• in 1925, federal investigators find no evidence of special jailhouses privileges provided to Johnny Torrio.
• in 1939, Frank Costello, Phil Kastel and two codefendants are indicted at New Orleans for income tax violations.
• in 1958, hoodlum Carmine Panariello is held as a material witness in the Brooklyn murder of John Robilotto.
• in 1961, the Philadelphia Crime Family holds an induction ceremony at the Buck Eye Athletic Club. Narcotics defendant Albert Agueci fails to appear for a scheduled court appearance in New York and is declared a fugitive.
• in 1963, Joseph Valachi testifies for a fifth and final time before the Senate McClellan Committee.
• in 1969, fugitives Francis Salemme and Stephen Flemmi are indicted for attempting to kill a Massachusetts attorney with a bomb.
• in 1974, Colombo Crime Family capodecina Dominick Scialo's body is found buried in a Brooklyn basement.
Image of Frank Costello

@genderandhistory.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 8:55 AM

We are pleased to say that our October Issue is now out!

This Issue includes 20 original articles, 16 #OpenAccess, and 9 book reviews. #Skystorians #GenderHistory

Read it here 👇
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14680424...

@royalhistsoc.org Oct 9, 2026, 8:25 AM

Booking is now available for the Society's 2026 Anniversary Lecture: 'From Cabaret Star to Gaullist Spy: Josephine Baker’s Secret War', with Professor Hanna Diamond (Cardiff) bit.ly/3VqcgiV

6pm, Friday 27 November, in person (London) and online. All are very welcome #Skystorians

@ideasroadshow.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 7:26 AM

🐴 Some of the magnificent horses in the The Procession of the Youngest King by Benozzo Gozzoli, c. 1459-1464.

Read more about this wonderful artist & his unique art 🧲 🐎: ideasroadshow.substack.com/p/three-hidd....

#frescofriday 🗃️ #arthistory #skystorians #art #italy #horse

Details of a beautiful horse in the The Procession of the Youngest King by Benozzo Gozzoli, c. 1459-1464.

Two beautiful horses, one white, one brown, in the The Procession of the Youngest King by Benozzo Gozzoli, c. 1459-1464.

@footnotesinhistory.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 4:10 AM

#OTD in 1944, Gordon Hirabayashi's legal battles with Selective Service continue. Charges stemming from a violation of Selective Service were dismissed but Assistant US Attorney Herbert O'Hare explained that Hirabayashi was being charged with "a more serious violation."
🗃 #skystorians

@iduhouse.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 3:35 AM

🌺 Artist of the Day: Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo painted pain, identity, and rebirth into vivid self-portraits that still speak across time. Her work was both intimate and universal, turning vulnerability into power and art into defiance.

fridakahlo.org

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #Art #ArtSky

Black-and-white portrait of Frida Kahlo photographed by her father, Guillermo Kahlo, in Coyoacán on October 16, 1932. She faces the camera directly, hair center-parted and pinned back, wearing dangling earrings, layered necklaces, and a dark woven shawl. Her expression is steady and unsmiling, the plain gray background leaving her face to carry the image. The date makes this portrait especially charged. Earlier that year Frida and Diego Rivera had moved to Detroit for Rivera’s Detroit Industry mural commission. In July, after a traumatic miscarriage, Kahlo painted Henry Ford Hospital, turning blood, anatomy, grief, and the hospital bed into an unusually direct visual account of reproductive loss. Then, in September, she hurried back to Mexico after learning that her mother, Matilde Calderón, was gravely ill. Matilde died on September 15. Matilde had taught Frida a love of sewing, fabrics, and texture, giving the shawl here resonance. One month and one day later, Frida sat for this photograph by Guillermo. We cannot know what father and daughter intended the portrait to say, but its timing places it between two immense losses and a year in which Kahlo’s art became more insistently autobiographical. Guillermo was not simply a relative with a camera. A professional architectural photographer, he had photographed Frida since childhood, creating a visual record that predates the self-fashioned image she later constructed in paint and in collaborations with major photographers. Here that transformation is already visible. The shawl, jewelry, direct gaze, and composed stillness are not decorative details alone. Kahlo was developing a public image rooted in Mexican dress and self-possession while her paintings transformed private bodily history into modern art. The photograph catches her before worldwide “Frida” iconography hardened into legend: 25 years old, grieving, physically vulnerable, and already learning how powerfully an artist could author her own image.

Frida Kahlo’s 1940 Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird. Kahlo faces us from a dense wall of green leaves, her joined eyebrows, faint mustache, braided hair, and calm gaze rendered with precise detail. A necklace of thorns bites into her neck and draws small drops of blood. A dead black hummingbird hangs at her throat; a spider monkey grips the thorns at one shoulder while a black cat watches from the other. Butterflies and dragonflies hover above her hair. Nothing in the image looks accidental, yet its symbols resist one fixed translation. Kahlo painted it during one of the most emotionally unsettled periods of her life. She and Diego Rivera divorced in late 1939 after a decade of marriage marked by devotion, political partnership, and affairs on both sides. Her long relationship with photographer Nickolas Muray had also ended as a romance. In 1940, while living independently and producing some of her strongest portraits, Kahlo turned her own body into a field where pain, nature, desire, Mexican visual culture, and endurance could coexist. The thorns evoke injury and sacrifice without reducing the image to victimhood: Kahlo remains upright, frontal, and almost unnervingly composed. The hummingbird, monkey, cat, insects, and vegetation have inspired religious, political, folkloric, and biographical readings, but the Harry Ransom Center notes that scholars interpret the work in multiple ways. That ambiguity is part of its power. The painting soon entered Muray’s collection and hung for decades in his New York apartment, where this intimate image of his former lover became part of daily family life before entering the Ransom Center collection in 1965. Kahlo and Rivera remarried in December 1940. Seen from that threshold, the portrait is not simply a picture of heartbreak. It is an act of self-construction by an artist insisting that suffering, love, cultural identity, and survival could occupy the same face without canceling one another.

Black-and-white 1931 portrait of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera by Paul A. Juley, made in sculptor Ralph Stackpole’s studio in San Francisco. Rivera, in a three-piece suit, sits high on the arm of an upholstered chair and rests one arm around Kahlo. Frida sits below him in a patterned long skirt, dark rebozo, layered necklaces, earrings, and lace-up shoes, hands composed across her lap as both artists look toward the camera. The arrangement reflects a real imbalance in public recognition at the time. Rivera was already a celebrated muralist, invited to California for major commissions. Kahlo, in her early twenties and married to him since 1929, had not yet achieved comparable recognition. Yet San Francisco became an important stage in her emergence as an artist with a distinct language. The couple arrived in late 1930 while Rivera worked on murals for the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts. Kahlo met physician Leo Eloesser, who became a lifelong friend and doctor, and entered a circle that included Stackpole and photographers Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham. The Frida captured in these photographs was shaping the Mexican clothing and jewelry that would become part of her public image. More importantly, she was painting. In San Francisco she made Frieda and Diego Rivera, an intimate alternative to the monumental mural tradition surrounding her. The painting was shown in 1931 at the San Francisco Society of Women Artists, an early public appearance of her work in the United States. SFMOMA notes that her California period helped move her painting toward a more focused, folkloric portrait language grounded in nineteenth-century Mexican popular art. So this photograph records more than a famous marriage. Rivera may physically tower over her, but Kahlo was already building an artistic identity that would eventually stand apart from his. The camera catches that transition while it is still happening.

Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas, painted in 1939. Two versions of Kahlo sit side by side against a stormy blue-gray sky, holding hands. The Frida at left wears a white European-style lace dress; the Frida at right wears a colorful Tehuana blouse and long skirt central to Kahlo’s public image. Both hearts are exposed. A thin artery connects them: the Tehuana Frida holds a tiny portrait of Diego Rivera, while the artery travels across both bodies until the white-dressed Frida clamps its severed end with surgical forceps. Blood stains her white skirt. At roughly 173 centimeters square, it was one of her largest works. Kahlo painted this double self-portrait in the year she and Rivera divorced, making private rupture visible through anatomy, clothing, and doubling rather than conventional narrative. Museo Frida Kahlo describes the costumes as invoking two strands of her origins, European heritage and Mexican tradition, connected heart to heart. The Museo de Arte Moderno also reads the work as a split between identities and notes Rivera’s fondness for her Tehuana dress. Those interpretations matter, but the painting exceeds a simple “loved Frida” versus “rejected Frida” equation. Both women are Kahlo; both bleed into the same circulatory system; and they hold one another’s hand. The work arrived when André Breton had promoted Kahlo as a Surrealist. In 1940 it appeared in the International Exhibition of Surrealism, yet Kahlo resisted the idea that she painted dreams, insisting that her imagery came from lived reality. The Two Fridas makes that position visible: emotional pain becomes exposed organs, identity becomes costume, and heartbreak becomes a shared bloodstream. Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes purchased the painting directly from Kahlo in 1947, and it later entered the Museo de Arte Moderno collection. What began in the aftermath of a marriage became one of modern art’s enduring images of a self refusing to be singular.

@kefauver4prez.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 1:07 AM

Time to get cranking!

Kefauver in front of an old Model T Ford with a class of teenage boys in Massachusetts in April 1952. I presume he's handing over his hat so he can show the boys how to start the car up.

#skystorians #history #polisky

@christinkallama.bsky.social Oct 8, 2026, 10:54 PM

For the What's History Feed #Skystorians

@glienkestephan.bsky.social Oct 8, 2026, 7:50 PM

So true ... 😔

#writing #academicchatter #skystorians #academia #author #literature #publishing

@royalhistsoc.org Oct 8, 2026, 3:36 PM

Closing next Friday (16th): 'History and Archives in Practice' 2027. Calls for panels invited for our annual meeting of historians and archivists, with @ihr.bsky.social and TNA.

HAP27 focuses on connecting past and future with sessions on advocacy & applied history bit.ly/3RGHbWy #Skystorians

@verbumlibere.bsky.social Oct 8, 2026, 3:08 PM

Winston Churchill called it the "Unknown War". But was it so unknown? Continuation of the series on the First World War.

If you're interested in our text‑based recommendations, subscribe to our newsletter.

#skystorians #history #firstworldwar #academicsky #edusky #disease

@plerner.bsky.social Oct 8, 2026, 3:01 PM

Happening now #skystorians

@royalhistsoc.org Oct 8, 2026, 3:00 PM

For more on the RHS Prizes 2027, including eligibility and the four winning authors from 2026, please see:

> First Book Prize: bit.ly/4y1PWd2
> Early Career Article Prize bit.ly/47nTXgJ

#Skystorians 2/2

Image of the web page for the RHS Early Career Article Prize.

@royalhistsoc.org Oct 8, 2026, 3:00 PM

Submissions are now invited for the Society's 2027 First Book and Early Career Article Prizes - covering monographs and articles published in 2026 bit.ly/4z45bD8

The closing date for submissions is 14 December 2026. Judging begins in early 2027 with winners announced next July #Skystorians 1/2