Author Archives: michaeljdouma
Emotional 18th century letters
New York, 1761. Jacob Ten Broek writes a letter to his brother in New Jersey to inform him that their mother has died. It is the hand of a farmer, no punctuation, some awkward spelling, sometimes indicating how Dutch was pronounced in 18th century New York. 1761, April 8 Waerde broeder dese tot bekent makinge […]
Counting pounds, shillings, and pence
I came across this back-of-the-page sketching in an 18th century collection the other day. It is simple addition of sums in pounds, shillings, and pence.
“The Most Conservative Americans”?
An article in the The Economist titled “Why are Dutch-Americans so different from the Dutch?” lumps together all Dutch Americans, by which it means a few Michigan politicians and the residents of the city of Holland, Michigan, to explain why they are such backward conservatives. The article’s subtitle betrays the game the author wants […]
Modern-day Barrowman
My copy of Peter F. Copeland’s Early American Crafts and Occupations Coloring Book (Dover Publications, 1994) includes an image of a barrowman, a person responsible for digging up stones and removing them from farmed soil. Anyone who has ever farmed knows how miserable it is to run into a stone. The foundation stones from a […]
Cycles within cycles: Viewing the Year, Month, and Day
This interesting image of a spatial view of time comes from a Guatemala friend. She explains that the year moves clockwise, and each month itself is comprised of weeks that move in a clockwise manner, and that days are themselves like small clockwise circles within those weeks. Ptolemy would be proud.
Memory and Spatial-Time Synesthesia
The documentary The Boy Who Can’t Forget contains an interview with a woman (Jill Price) who has an incredible memory of past events. Indeed, Price is burdened by the past. She remembers too much, and forgets too little. Not surprisingly, Price has some form of space-time synesthesia that helps her automatically structure her past in […]
Spatial Visualization of Time in the Voynich Manuscript
In the first chapter of my book Creative Historical Thinking (Routledge, 2018),I describe some of the different ways that we visualize time in spatial form. A common way of viewing the year is as a circle, divided into seasons or months (perhaps accompanied by the constellations of the zodiac). In my own synesthetic view of […]
Some daguerreotypes
I picked up a few daguerreotypes in reasonable condition and at a decent price ($20-$25 each) at an antique store the other day. Both cases had broken hinge, but were otherwise complete. The old man has some coloring added to his cheeks – something I have seen before, especially with later tintypes – but the […]
Graduate Students and Elite Historian Networks
It is my intuition that the best-placed young historians today come from a small set of elite universities. But, as Lavar Burton would say, don’t take my word for it. Take a look at the 2015 article by Clauset, Arbesman, and Larremore, “Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks” which shows that the […]
