Author Archives: michaeljdouma
Old Photos of Home
The previous owner of my home sent me some photographs of it from the 1980s. The build date was 1986. Like always, learning history brings up more questions than it answers. At the time, the house was much smaller. It was a cabin built by and for a retired guy. At some point, they added […]
1950s Slide Projector
Today I stopped by one of my favorite antique stores, Alpha & Omega Antiques, near Staunton, VA. I found a box of slides and a projector in near mint condition. With some help from my friend Mike Healy, the store’s owner, we got the projector working. After a few adjustments, we projected an image against […]
Dutch New York Slavery and Pinkster
I wrote a review of Jeroen DeWulf’s, The Pinkster King and the King of Congo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (Jackson, Miss.: University of Mississippi Press, 2017) for BMGN, the top history journal in the Netherlands. BMGN is short for Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlands. Of course. I […]
Zeno’s Tax Paradox
I wrote a short article for FEE.org, the website of the Foundation for Economic Education.
Reading an unreadable copy of a microfilmed newspaper
I’ve shown y’all some examples before of difficult historical handwriting. This is the digitized version of the microfilm copy of the 1859 Pella Gazette (in Iowa). It’s about politics. I’m reading hours of this stuff and its like listening to a record that is 50% static. At least it is in English. There is plenty […]
Book Event – Netherlands East Indies
I’m hosting a book event this Thursday for Fred Borch, a historian who has written a new book on war crimes of the Japanese in the Netherlands East Indies (when Indonesia was still a Dutch colony). I’ll be serving as the interviewer/ moderator for the discussion. More information about the event is here:
Dutch Art Nouveau Month Calendar
In my forthcoming book Creative Historical Thinking (Routledge), I describe many ways in which people have different structural views of time: timelines that go up and down, this way and that; mental images of the week, month, or year, that organize information in different way. This Dutch Calendar has the days running from top to […]
German Handwriting in Rockingham County, Virginia
Literacy was power, and those who could read and write were able to hold political office, interpret legal documents, participate more readily in the marketplace, and stay informed of news from beyond the valley. Periodical subscriptions in the valley were limited to an elite audience, and the “nonsubscribing masses” were therefore dependent on these elites […]
Historic Inscriptions in the Shenandoah Valley
In the thousands of names and dates inscribed on the walls of Virginia’s Grand Caverns I see a giant puzzle, a sort of tapestry of American culture, two hundred years in the making. Some names, dating as early as 1808, were engraved in the form of type-set letters, the red walls carefully scarred to reveal […]
Hampshire is my Willoughby
One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes is “A Stop at Willoughby.” In case you haven’t seen it, or don’t remember, this episode features a New York City white collar worker who steps out of the train into a late 19th century town. In typically Twilight Zone fashion, his visit to this lost place is […]
Michael J Douma 