Loved the Pfälzer Wandermusikanten workshop @ Kusel! The Institut für pfälzische Geschichte und Volkskunde brilliantly connected 'academic' with 'local' historians. The castle setting and hearing the music performed live by the Kusel Music Academy were unforgettable experiences. A 🧵 following soon..

📢CfP! At the #EAUH2026 in Barcelona (sept 26), Hilde, Rosa and I are organising a session on the long term history of lodgers/boarders. We welcome papers on any area between 1500 and now.
Interested? www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu/sessions/#se... Or DM me directly. Sharing is welcome #UrbanHistory

What is the difference between a historian and a sociologist? A long time scale and bad data.

Perhaps a bit reductive but on point what the data concerns 🤣 Sam Bass Warner being interviewed by Bruce Stave in the first issue of Journal of Urban History in 1974

Serieuzer nu: het zou wel fijn zijn als onze journalistiek iets kritischer zou omspringen met de verkoopspraatjes van techbros

Uhu Ok 👍

New Microsoft study estimates that historians are the *2nd* occupation whose tasks AI can mostly cover, based on a large database of its Copilot users & their reported satisfaction.
That AI makes a poor historian is imo not a debate, but the fact that so many turn to LLMs for history is concerning.

Reading that even Mozart found it difficult to find time to write gives me hope in difficult times 🥲

Seen at the Mozart Geburtshaus in Salzburg.

Result 5: This heightened volatility is undoubtedly a consequence of Antwerp's violent port-modernisation, which created a largely low-skilled and seasonally-bound labour market. Yet, housekeepers dealt w these challenges in their own ways: advertising, expanding, relocating, were all strategies.

How did housekeepers run a business in such a volatile world? Migrants housekeepers capitalised best on urban changes, being entrepreneurially oriented. Foreign migrants capitalised on transit neighbourhoods (railway & harbour) while local housekeepers operated in some of the worst slums (Result 4).

Result 3: The demand of migrant accommodation increased consistently throughout the century yet, interestingly, this did not create a more 'stable' lodging house sector. Instead housekeepers diversified their incomes, and kept businesses running for shorter times.

Result 1: like Gazzano, many households were headed by migrants. Although quite surprisingly, many locals too. Housekeepers did not mirror Antwerp's migrant population. Instead it represented those groups most in need of shelter, which for example included many local dockers and workers.

Although omnipresent and vital for cities, little is known about lodging housekeepers. In my recent article in Social History, I sought to understand this group: who were they, and how did they organise their daily lives?
As a case I used the drastically expanding city of Antwerp (1850-1880).

Accommodating strangers as lodgers into the household has historically been a widespread phenomenon, with estimations of up to 1/4 of all urban households. Some families turned this into their profession: the lodging housekeeper, like Luca Gazzano and Maria Beckers in late 19th C Antwerp.

Lodging housekeepers occupy a dual role in history: they are well established in key debates on housing, work, and migration, yet they are rarely the main subject of historical analysis.

A small 🧵 on what studying this group teaches about this subject based on my new article in #SocialHistory

📢Publication horn: happy to see my new article '"The police in every hotel"? Hospitality governance in Antwerp during the long nineteenth century', is now published online in @imm-min-journal.bsky.social.
🔗 Read it here: doi.org/10.1080/0261...

A short🧵 on its findings (1/5)

Thoughts welcome!

"Von Duitschland nach Amerika und zurück". @lordoftheringsfp.bsky.social-fans, the original "There and back back again" was not written by Tolkien, but by Reinhold Libau. His diary describes his journey from a village near Leipzig to America in 1887. A🧵 on transit-migration and cities in history 👇

Soon... in a messy map on a computer near you containing 467.000 other unread pdfs... "The Lodging House and the City"
The PhD is finally #PhPrinted! 😁

Slowly waking up from my winter slumber and getting back into it. To help me in this process is history's muse Clio, whom I had the pleasure to meet in the Vatican. Looking forward to start posting some more here 👀