Michelle Watson
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michwatsonoz.bsky.social
Michelle Watson
@michwatsonoz.bsky.social
1.1K followers 470 following 1.5K posts
Archivist. Community historian. Genealogist. Stockton, NSW during WW1. MIM - family history researchers as an uni archives user group. Digital Humanities. LOD. (she/her) - https://www.michellewatson.org - Worimi Country
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After two years of work, the @stocktonhistsoc.bsky.social Online Archive is now live. I hope it can act as a model for small heritage and #GLAM groups to make their collections more accessable and create backups of unique cultural materials. Cost $100AUD p/a #GenHour

stockton.omeka.net
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Help me turn the State Library of Victoria's digitised maps into data! https://wragge.github.io/slv-allmaps/ (bit of a soft launch, so let me know if you see any errors in the documentation...)
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Congratulations to AHA member Annemarie McLaren for the publication of her new book "Aboriginal-Colonial Exchanges in New South Wales 1800—1835: When the Strangers Came to Stay"! Grab a copy at the link: global.oup.com/academic/pro...
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HAPPENING NOW: Portland Police Commander Franz Schoening testifies that federal officers on Oct. 18 barraged protesters with crowd control munitions — not because of any violence but because another federal officer accidentally shot tear gas onto the roof of the ICE facility.
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African #bookhistory in the archives
“The rich archival collections of Ajami literature refute the pervasive myth of Africa’s supposed illiteracy that is perpetuated by the overemphasis on African oral traditions in academia and the privileging of external sources over local chronicles.”

www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/theajami-s...
TheʿAjamī script of Africa and the Sorabé manuscripts of Madagascar.
The most widely used writing system in pre-colonial Africa was the ʿAjamī script.
www.africanhistoryextra.com
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Holy shit, all of this is incredible, and it's short, go read it!!!!
“The [MFA] has reached a historic agreement with the known descendants of David Drake (also known as Dave the Potter) regarding two monumental stoneware vessels in the MFA’s collection that were made by the enslaved potter and poet…”
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Resolves Ownership of Works by Enslaved Artist David Drake
BOSTON (October 29, 2025)—The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), has reached a historic agreement with the known descendants of David Drake (also k
www.mfa.org
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This was just posted by a CBS News producer on their Instagram stories.
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FWIW, this was in California. In the Bay Area.

You know, where book bans "don't happen" because it's a "good" "blue" state.

If you were celebrating Banned Books Week earlier this month, time to get on the phone and spread the word.
Joanna Ho and Caroline Kusin Pritchard, authors of THE DAY THE BOOKS DISAPPEARED, had their elementary school author visit canceled when they arrived and students were waiting for them.

Why? Because they wouldn't *not* talk about book bans–inspiration for their book.

bookriot.com/the-day-the-...
Why Did These Authors Have Their School Visit Canceled? They Were Talking About Their Book About Book Bans.
Country Club Elementary School in California's Bay Area canceled an author visit moments before it began. Why? It covered book bans.
bookriot.com
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Read the skeet a second and third time before you quote dunk on it to make sure you aren’t totally misreading it and getting your feelings hurt for no reason as justification for being a jerk challenge
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TEXTILE SHAKESPEARE is official-publication-date-minus-2-weeks (11 November) which is a LOT👀 (I can't remember feeling this wound up about other books, I have the concentration of a gnat at the moment🙄) but seems to be live as an e-book already so, available to your Kindle right now, apparently...
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Australian colleagues have been exploring the redirection of British slave-owners capital from the Caribbean into the colonisation of Australia. As Britons ended slavery they intensified the destruction of Indigenous societies. Latest addition from Zoe Laidlaw:

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Capital, Agents and Absentees: Port Phillip Pastoralism and the Profits of Slavery
This article reveals that British-based merchants invested capital made from the Atlantic slave complex in the early Port Phillip District’s pastoral sector. It traces the capital that underpinned ...
www.tandfonline.com
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This is the most enraging timeline. Yes, it is racist to say there are too many Black and Asian people on TV/in Birmingham/in the UK. No, I’m not going to debate it. The end.
Waking up, again, to the sound of two white men on the radio arguing about whether it is ok to be made "mad" by the very sight of black and Asian people on TV. 😒
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Spectacular good news. A victory for the family who sued; for the local trans activists; & for anyone who pushes back against Australia falling into the western Trumphole of non-peer-reviewed, JFK-brain , Project 2025 nonsense 😍✊
The decision to indefinitely ban the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for children with gender dysphoria was unlawful and did not follow proper procedures, a court has ruled. Read more: tinyurl.com/43wz9s62
Check with the archive as well. While many will allow photography, they don’t allow tripods.
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This thread makes a point I find myself coming to often these days.

It's hard to make this point in a way that doesn't sound like a threat, but it's just a fact that for centuries the wealthy in America worried that the mob would come get them and did all they could to avoid that fate.
lol what the wealthy today don't seem to understand is part of staying wealthy in society is not pissing off the masses.

There's a reason why Carnegie and the Rockefellers poured money into institutions. Gutting institutions and making it harder for the masses to survive is a...choice.
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Something I love about archival films is that when someone had a couple feet of film left on a roll they'd often use it to film their cat. So many films finish with a few seconds of cats

So, here's some cats from the 1950s and 60s. They were loved

Scanned from 8mm films

#Film #History #Cats
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It’s not a cock-up. It’s a deliberate strategy to get you to pay (something between $174 and $4037 pa, plus a $1699 start-up charge) for things that they used to provide to everybody regardless of capacity to pay.

Hence "Subscribe to become a registered user of our real-time data products".
The BOM have destroyed their website - no current observations by weather station available anymore for example. Royal Commission now. I want people sacked.
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Whenever people complain about the number of folks relying on food stamps, it is worth reminding them that SNAP is, by too large of a degree, a subsidy for corporations that refuse to pay a living wage and their political allies who reject public policy prescriptions to reduce income inequality.
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⏰ We are getting excited for our final Book+Author of 2025 this Thursday!

Liam Byrne will be speaking about the history of Australian unionism at the intimate Bard's Apothecary in the CBD, with Professor Sean Scalmer at the helm.

➡ Book now to reserve your spot!: tinyurl.com/4zas4ws4
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Any influential law profs want to advocate for this? I don't have the reach or networks to move the needle.
Not to diminish law review articles & law school committee work, but right now law professors should be working collectively on an intellectual & service project of immense, existential importance: building consensus around a revolutionary constitutional framework-of a Reconstruction 2.0 magnitude.
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Baltimore’s Black archives and museums are still standing tall baltimorebeat.com/the-importan...
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Australians, please raid your Uncle's old PC in his shed, and help me find a copy of this to archive.

#Australia #AFL #DOSGaming #Wolfenstein #RetroGaming #MSDOS #RetroComputing
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DOS archaeology ain't much, but it's honest work.