Author Archives: michaeljdouma
An African American Migration Mystery (part 3)
Continuing now with my third post on the topic of African Americans in Washington County, N.Y. In the previous posts, I challenged the 1810 census reading of 2,815 “other persons not including Indians not taxed” for Washington County. More specifically, I challenged the idea that these were all free blacks and I suggested that perhaps […]
Where did 2,500 missing African Americans go? Or were they never there in the first place?
In a previous post, I questioned whether there was a large African American migration to Washington County NY in the first decade of the 19th century, or if this was actually some kind of census anomaly. Could over 2,500 free African Americans move into and out of a rural county in one decade and be […]
1827 was a vertical year
In my book, Creative Historical Thinking, I consider why people conceive of time in different shapes, and what effect this might have on how we shape chronologies, how we write and think about history, and how we communicate with each other. Spatial representations of time can be idiosyncratic, but they also have a social, collective […]
Historians “Show Your Work”
I never liked it when a math teacher told me to “show my work.” What do you mean, “Show my work?” “I answered the problem in my head. There is nothing to show.” Sometimes, however, showing your work as a historian can be a useful exercise, especially as a form of pedagogy. Students need to […]
Virginia Tech Presentation
Last week, I drove down to Blacksburg Virginia to give a presentation about my new book, Creative Historical Thinking. The program that invited me did a short write-up. Here are some pictures. How to date a picture by counting the stars on the flag. This one is a trick though – sometimes frugal Americans carried […]
Update: Hampshire (and Mineral Counties) Population Hisotry
In my previous blog post, I mistakenly pointed to a demographic disaster in Hampshire County between 1860-1870, ascribing this to the effects of the Civil War. Boy was I wrong. A wise reader pointed out that Mineral County formed out of Hampshire County in 1866. To remedy my mistaken analysis from last post, here are […]
Hampshire County WV – Historic Population Data in Charts
(edit: a wise reader pointed out that Mineral County broke off from Hampshire County in the 1860s, thereby throwing off all of my data analysis here. For an update, see my next blog post) County-level census data is available through IMPUS and the National Historical Geographic Information System. I’ve decided to use […]
A Census Anomaly or a Large African American Migration in upstate New York?
North of Albany, along New York’s border with Vermont, Washington County formed in 1772, and grew quickly in its first decades. If the census is to be trusted, there appears to have been a large migration of free African Americans into and then out of the county between 1800 and 1820. Census records note that […]
How (not) to write a thesis statement
Too often I see history books with arguments of the nature: “x also shaped y.” They are usually written like this: “Early Virginian society was not only shaped by economics but also by gender relations” or “the American Civil War also had international impact.” I respond typically by uttering “that is not a thesis”, as […]
Is there a Conservative Philosophy of History?
Conservative historians have long battled the left over the proper interpretation of the facts of history, but in arguments about the philosophy of history, conservatives have ceded the field almost entirely. At first glance, it appears that conservative historians have no philosophy of history, or that they even reject theoretical and philosophical discussions about the […]
