Kristan Tetens
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tetens.bsky.social
Kristan Tetens
@tetens.bsky.social
Hat #1: Chartered PR/strategic comms professional, UK higher education sector. Hat #2: PhD'd historian currently writing about my family's connections with the Danish West Indies, c. 1720-1900. Former Michiganian … ask me about Petoskey stones and Motown!
Pinned
View of the Moravian mission at Friedensthal near Christiansted, St. Croix, Danish West Indies, c. 1777. My 5x great-grandmother was baptised there sometime in the 1780s, ditching her slave name for "Dorothea."
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
Protesters in Nigeria have disrupted this week’s opening of a major museum of West African art, where local disputes over the world-renowned Benin Bronzes have already kept them from being put on display. https://to.pbs.org/43klMFo
Protesters disrupt opening of major West African art museum in Nigeria
Protesters in Nigeria have disrupted this week’s opening of a major museum of West African art, where local disputes over the world-renowned Benin Bronzes have already kept them from being put on disp...
www.pbs.org
November 10, 2025 at 10:33 PM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
"Fine-grained...[and] painstakingly researched." Read @alanlester.bsky.social's review of Roquinaldo Ferreira's Worlds of Unfreedom in @historytoday.com: www.historytoday.com/archive/revi...
‘The Heretic of Cacheu’ and ‘Worlds of Unfreedom’ review
www.historytoday.com
November 5, 2025 at 7:05 PM
A glowing review of Miranda Kaufmann’s ‘Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery,’ a study that, among other things, considers “Britons’ (continuing) failure to appreciate how much of their affluence was (and still is) based on the suffering of distant others.”
October 15, 2025 at 4:54 AM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
”Mennesker flygtede ikke kun ud af Caribien for at opnå frihed, men også til andre caribiske øer, hvor forholdene måske blev anset for mere tålelige.”
🎙️Hør podcasten 'Caribiens skjulte forbindelser' med #MånedensForsker Gunvor Simonsen 👉 bit.ly/podcast_gunvor #dkforsk
October 3, 2025 at 6:31 AM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
LONDON PUBS NAMED AFTER DIFFERENT NUMBERS OF BELLS. an investigation
September 17, 2025 at 9:17 AM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
As book banning sweeps across the U.S. at an unprecedented rate, brave librarians emerge as first responders in the fight for democracy. A film by Kim A. Snyder.

Opens UK 9/26 @berthadochouse.bsky.social, US 10/03 @filmforumnyc.bsky.social, rollout to follow.

Tix: TheLibrariansFilm.com/screenings
September 5, 2025 at 9:42 PM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
No film gets historians right, but that's only because no audience wants to watch someone quietly work their way through a cardboard box of old papers, in total silence, for eight straight hours.
an interesting subtopic! which shows/movies are beloved by the profession for Getting It Right! Lawyers famously love MY COUSIN VINNIE, doctors I believe love SCRUBS, apparently Aussie barristers are surprisingly fond of RAKE's depiction of some aspects of the law.
Oh god I remember watching HOUSE with some doctors, it was a the usual mix of “you would get fired instantly and never practice medicine again no matter how good u are” and “that case actually isn’t hard to solve at all”
August 28, 2025 at 11:32 PM
Rose in a teacup.

Rose, nature’s handiwork from my garden; teacup, Simon Pettet’s "Storm in a Tea-Cup" mug from Dennis Severs’ House, shop.dennissevershouse.co.uk/products/sim...
August 22, 2025 at 2:34 PM
This would have been the perfect cover art for Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital.
'Starry Night and the Astronauts' by Alma Thomas

She made this painting in 1972, when she was eighty. In the same year, she became the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum.
August 20, 2025 at 9:58 AM
Thread. 🧵
"How bad slavery was" is worse. Much worse. Much worse than you think, much worse than you're taught, much worse than museums depict. Worse.
August 19, 2025 at 9:26 PM
Who was the real Miss Lambe, Jane Austen’s mixed-race heroine?

www.thetimes.com/article/1d1a...
Who was the real Miss Lambe, Jane Austen’s mixed-race heroine?
Austen scholar Paula Byrne makes the case that the intriguing character from Sanditon, her unfinished novel, was likely based on a real woman
www.thetimes.com
August 7, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Beautiful Digital Edition of the Poet’s Pressed Plants & Flowers Is Now Online
Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Beautiful Digital Edition of the Poet’s Pressed Plants & Flowers Is Now Online
So many writers have been gardeners and have written about gardens that it might be easier to make a list of those who didn’t. But even in this crowded company, Emily Dickinson stands out.
www.openculture.com
August 1, 2025 at 3:47 PM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
I’m part of a project near and dear to my heart, a documentary about Nancy Drew: her stories, games, & place in girls’ imaginations

Funding was cut by the fed, so it’s up to Kickstarter. Please, if you can - this is a special project that deserves to come out

www.kickstarter.com/projects/cod...
Nancy Drew: The Case of the American Icon
Full-length documentary exploring the history and cultural impact of literature’s OG girl sleuth - Nancy Drew
www.kickstarter.com
July 29, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
Blog on the story of the British Empire embodied in the fabric of one picturesque rural church. Its construction & memorials reflect slavery & antislavery; the East India Company; racial discrimination & liberal imperialism in South Africa, & drowned African troops.

alanlester.co.uk/blog/newtimb...
Newtimber Church and the British Empire
St John the Evangelist Church at Newtimber, West Sussex, is a lovely little building nestled in the South Downs. You couldn’t really imagine a more idyllic spot, or such incongruity with the subjec…
alanlester.co.uk
July 28, 2025 at 6:45 AM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
Japanese prints from 1873 depicting famous Western inventors and scholars in times of trouble. Pictured: Audubon (work eaten by mice), Carlyle (papers burnt), and Arkwright (spinning machine smashed by wife). More here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/j...
July 20, 2025 at 7:45 PM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
Fascinating: `Reclaiming the Lost Archive of the Convento de San Agustin' a project led by Christina Lee and Maria Cristina Martinez-Juan has launched the digital reconstruction of the dispersed 18th-century Library of the Convent of San Agustin in Manila

1762archive.org
Home - Repatriating a Lost Library of the Spanish Pacific
Reclaiming the Lost Archive of the Convento de San Agustin Skip Go 761 Manuscripts Collected from The Lilly Library The Lopez Library San Agustin Museum King’s College SOAS British Library The 1762 Ar...
1762archive.org
July 19, 2025 at 5:57 AM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
The Necessary Companion (in German "Der Nöthige Gefehrte") was a perpetual calendar published in 1675 Leipzig, Germany. The pamphlet provided detailed information on how to use this #almanac: including 3 #volvelles to calculate correctly. This was an #earlymodern learning tool to teach #astronomy.
November 28, 2024 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
Decades of mechanistic talk about university degrees as if they were bundles of 'skills' and 'prep' are about to be proved completely wrong (obviously). Want to get a real boost? Do History or English.
July 13, 2025 at 10:19 AM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
no, I said I wanted a tradewife. like a union electrician
July 11, 2025 at 4:31 PM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them (1948) is the subject of June's episode of the literary podcast Backlisted. The hosts speak with Tanya Kirk, author, editor and the Librarian of St John’s College, Cambridge.
www.backlisted.fm/episodes/242...
242. The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner — Backlisted
Sylvia Townsend Warner's  The Corner That Held Them  (1948) is the subject of this episode, almost ten years since Backlisted covered the same author's classic debut  Lolly Willowes ...
www.backlisted.fm
July 10, 2025 at 6:58 PM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
me cherishing a weird skeet
July 5, 2025 at 12:11 PM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
We’ve launched a new collection of openly accessible videos, Interviews with Historians, in which prominent 20th century historians reflect on their lives and professional practices. Access the collection here:
www.history.ac.uk/library-digi...
June 26, 2025 at 12:53 PM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
I frequently take comfort in the fact that the Universe is vast and beautiful and entirely unaffected by petty human foolishness
June 23, 2025 at 5:46 PM
Reposted by Kristan Tetens
Introducing...your sneak peek at the cosmos captured by NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory!

Can you guess these regions of sky?

This is just a small peek...join us at 11am US EDT for your full First Look at how Rubin will #CaptureTheCosmos! 🔭🧪

#RubinFirstLook
ls.st/rubin-first-look-livestream
June 23, 2025 at 4:06 AM