Author Archives: michaeljdouma
The Bottom 6 Worst Books on History
First, a word about what this list is not. I’m not going to rail against the standard methods book, which has been re-packaged and republished about twice a year every year for the last hundred years. Here are a few examples: Barzun & Graff, The Modern Researcher (1957) Norman Cantor and Richard Schneider, How to […]
2-part Interview about my New Book
Last week I visited my friend Anthony Comegna at the CATO Institute to talk about my new book, Creative Historical Thinking. Apparently the original stock of the book is sold out, so they are printing more. I don’t know if that means they sold 5, 50, or 150 copies. I’m pretty happy with how the […]
Top Ten Best Books on the Philosophy or Methods of History
What are the best books in the philosophy or methods of history? Well, I’m trying to read basically all of them. Seriously, and there are a lot, so sometimes I only read a few pages and determine that a book is worthless. Or, I can tell from the table of contents and a cursory look […]
The Shame of Forgetting Maurice Mandelbaum
While most historians have never heard of him, Maurice Mandelbaum, a philosophy professor at Darmouth University, was the founding father of the analytic philosophy of history. When Mandelbaum launched his professional career in the 1930s, the “philosophy of history” meant essentially what we would today call “speculative history”, that is, grand theorizing about the ultimate […]
The Vanishing Academic Conservative Historian (Part 2: the bet is accepted)
Alright, folks, I’ve received quite a few reactions to my post from July 4th. It seems that all you have to do is mention politics in academia and everyone gets into a tizzy. If only Dutch history were so popular. At any rate, someone has taken me up on the bet, that within the next […]
The Vanishing Conservative Academic Historian
Let’s say you are a young conservative undergraduate, and you would like to go to grad school in history. Where would you look for a friendly advisor? If you are considering an Ivy League school, you might want to think again. According to research by Langbert, Quain, and Klein, available data indicates a ratio of […]
Assignments to turn students into historians
As a college student, I wrote a lot of history research papers. Research and writing are two essential tasks of a historian. However, when a class is only 15 weeks long, and when students are being introduced to a topic for the first time, it seems unfair and unproductive to assign them a 15 to […]
History Books at San Carlos University (Guatemala)
The San Carlos University in Guatemala, is the biggest and oldest university in Central America, with well over 150,000 students at present. Each faculty (i.e. department) has it’s own library, and I would have loved to have seen the history department’s library, except the area seemed to be closed down for the summer. So, instead, […]
Interview with a Historian
In my ramblings through historical materials on youtube, I came across this fantastics Interview with historian Sir Brian Harrison. Harrison, former Professor of History at Oxford, talks about coming up as a history student in the 1950s in elite British circles. He reflects a bit on the uniqueness of his situation, and his surprise at […]
History job market experiences: the un-read application
As a historian, I try to focus my attention on the deeper past (say more than 50 years ago) and not dwell on my own history. The history of my experiences in grad school and on the job market might have something to teach others, however. With this post, I’m initiating a new category on […]
Michael J Douma 