Dear friends,
It’s not quite been like a UHaul, but it has taken a couple of weeks since I needed instruction and help and the actual transition was done by a remarkably generous digital expert at groups.io. I have been busy this last few days moving three lists from the continually deteriorating Yahoo groups social platform, to groups.io. In the last three years and accelerating when Verizon bought Yahoo, all the software on the social platform of yahoo groups has been debased and then increasingly ignored so that outages, glitches and endless individual problems go unfixed. Sometimes the whole group site vanishes for a time. And not even a boilerplate message explaining what has happened and if anything is being done. There is nowhere to ask a question or for a live individual to help. As the demise of net neutrality sinks in and brings changes based on commercial considerations of the largest profit, at any time Verizon could leave the yahoo groups vanished.
So rather than wait when it will be too late to retrieve archives, like others with communities at Yahoo who care about one another and their shared experiences, we’ve moved to groups.io. This is a new social platform run by Mark Fletcher, who invented the original ONElist, morphed it into egroups, sold it to Yahoo, come back to rescue this specific kind of experience. Among the astonishing attractions of groups.io is you can have its basic services for free, and they transferred the archives, all postings, all photos, all files (essays and whatever). A group’s identity is centered in its memory, which means its history. This the new site preserves.
Email groups are not obsolete. They still offer a kind of closed community interaction, which allows for longer messages, and encourages replies and relationships among the people posting much more frequent and much stronger than is found on blogs, face-book and other large anonymously-directed venues.
So very satisfied by what has happened, as I gather are many other Yahoo groups who moved there (I don’t have firm statistics for how many), this evening I thought I’d tell all the readers of this blog who are interested in Trollope and (a liberally defined) Nineteenth Century (1815-1914); Long Eighteenth Century studies, which I now expanded from just the terrain of the Enlightenment itself to historical fiction, romance and film (1660-1815); and women writers, artists of all kinds in all countries, all ages, and women’s issues; that the three lists I moderate have moved to this new version of the original site and have slightly new titles.
for Trollope and His Contemporaries, which now has the nifty abbreviation (I didn’t think of it) Trollope&Peers
https://groups.io/g/TrollopeAndHisContemporaries
New Banner: George Hicks, At the Post Office
Post: TrollopeAndHisContemporaries@groups.io
Subscribe: TrollopeAndHisContemporaries+subscribe@groups.io
Unsubscribe: TrollopeAndHisContemporaries+unsubscribe@groups.io
Group Owner: TrollopeAndHisContemporaries+owner@groups.io
Help: TrollopeAndHisContemporaries+help@groups.io
Mascot or Gravatar:
Donald Pleasence as Mr Harding playing his violoncello (1983 BBC Barchester Chronicles, scripted Alan Plater)
for WomenWriters:
https://groups.io/g/WomenWriters
New Banner: a collage of several paintings by Maud Lewis
Post: WomenWriters@groups.io
Subscribe: WomenWriters+subscribe@groups.io
Unsubscribe: WomenWriters+unsubscribe@groups.io
Group Owner: WomenWriters+owner@groups.io
Help: WomenWriters+help@groups.io
Gravatar:
Anonymous depiction of Christine de Pizan writing
for 18thCWorlds
Antonio Canaletto, Northumberland House
https://groups.io/g/18thCWorlds
Subscribe: 18thCWorlds+subscribe@groups.io
Unsubscribe: 18thCWorlds+unsubscribe@groups.io
Group Owner: 18thCWorlds+owner@groups.io
Help: 18thCWorlds+help@groups.io
Gravatar:
Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza Poldark, singing as she brings a basket of food to the coal mine owned and run by her husband
The first two have retained the same goal as they’ve had.
Trollope and His Contemporaries — a group of people who behave as friends and read and discuss Anthony Trollope, any 19th texts by other authors and 20th century one relevant to Trollope, by authors as supremely good as he is as a writer People are invited to discuss other books they are reading at the same time, and any movies or art seen and music heard …
Women Writers — a community of women readers. We discuss issues of interest to women as well as their art, writing, music, crafts and lives. We are much more a literary than political list, but it is assumed you are a feminist and progressive in outlook … Men are welcome but we stay with art by or (in the case of film) made with women in mind. We do sometimes have group readings and discussions
I’ve changed the last to encourage people reading historical fiction, romance and watching historical films (and adaptations) to join us and hope to start group reading and discussion of contemporary favorites. The older version only went for texts written in the 18th century (Boswell & Johnson, Fanny Burney, novels, poetry, educational treatises):
18th Century Worlds — for people who are interested in all things in the long 18th century (1660-1830): politics, history, literature, arts, music, society and culture. I also welcome readers and viewers of historical fiction and romance and films set in the 18th century … Books written in the 19th through 21st centuries about or set in the 18th century, or time-traveling tales are part of our terrain.
Sylvia Plath
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Elaine: “I’m fascinated by the fact that two centuries are called ‘the long century’. I never heard that before. Please tell me how that came about. I’m really interested to know :)”
Me: “Long” because the traditional bookends of the era are 1660 to 1800 and recently it’s been extended to 1815. So the long century begins with one insurrection and revolutionary group in the UK replaced by a traditional monarchy, the Stuarts (the UK), and ends with an insurgence led by remarkable military man, Napoleon, who upended the revolution (France), put down by a group of reactionary regimes across Europe. The same taste, dominance of a satiric point of view, and political system characterizes the era in the UK. Arguably if you wanted to make the period defined by literary movements you could say the 18th century ended in 1797 with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, and the Romantic-Regency era began and lasted until 1832 (the time of the Reform bill). Do you want to make political regimes? or the local art imaginary your criteria?