Ll. Zaturdag is in handen gesteld van den amerikaanschen consul te Amsterdam het volgend adres, voorzien van de handteekeningen van 160 leden der internationale vereeniging tot bevordering der sociale wetenschappen: >> Aan Abraham Lincoln, president der Vereenigde State. >> Mijnheer de president! >> Sedert zijn ontstaan volgen wij met grootste belangstelling den strijd, die gevoerd […]
My research on Dutch slavery in New York was recently referenced multiple times in an article in the popular Dutch magazine De Groene Amsterdammer. The writer, Leendert Van der Valk, has done a tremendous job of bringing early Dutch colonial American history to the modern Dutch public. More than just relating the stories of other […]
Over at Low-countries.com, I published a review of a new book about the Dutch language in America. The English version is already up here: https://www.the-low-countries.com/article/colonial-echoes-when-americans-spoke-dutch and a Dutch version of this review will appear soon in De Lage Landen magazine.
For the past six years or so, I have been researching American slavery, just at the time when this topic has become a political hot potato. I’ve become worried that moralistic language and attitudes, however well intended, will interfere with scholarship and make it more difficult to research certain aspects of slavery, or relate certain […]
A little over 5 years ago, I made a bet against conservatives in academia. I suggested that it would be near impossible for an Ivy League history department to hire a conservative in a tenure track position. Jeffrey Miron, senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University, took me up on the bet. The terms are […]
(continued from part 2) Reporters at the Cincinnati Enquirer eventually did the most to put the pieces together. For the last week of his life, Schade had lodged at the hotel and had entertained a stream of visitors, mostly Germans investing in his Panama colonization project. Schade had associates in this plan too, but […]
(continued from part 1) From the evidence in today’s digital newspaper databases, an historian can easily recognize that Schade was a difficult character who brought trouble everywhere he went. But to each new place he arrived, in his time, he cut the image of a respectable, albeit odd, German minister. While stories of Schade’s troubles […]
In 1899, a German Reformed minister named Augustus E. Schade self-published a book called The Philosophy of History.[1] The book was pure sophistry, some four hundred densely-filled pages of esoteric nonsense masquerading as scholarship. It is a window into the mind and career of a huckster. Not just an intellectual fraud, Schade’s entire career as […]
According to a newly published article, a quarter of all citations in peer-reviewed works on history “do not substantiate the propositions for which they are cited.” The authors call this an “error rate” or “quotation error.” No historian’s writing is perfectly free of such errors. Sometimes we write down the wrong date of a source, […]
The Fulbright program preserves a list of all previous recipients of its grant, and this data is searchable on its website here. So, I selected for all Americans who received Fulbright grants to study history in the Netherlands during their doctoral program of study. I did not include persons whose grants were awarded specifically for […]
Michael J Douma 