Category History Methods
Do more Meteorites fall in the morning than at night?
For a book I’m writing, I’ve spent an awful lot of time in the year 1883. It was a good year, more or less, and I’m come to understand the manner of speech, the outlook of the people, and, in short, to breathe their air. As a historian once said, keep researching until you can […]
“Word Maps” or “Maps without lines”
When it was still expensive and difficult to print maps, some sources created “maps” like this one, in German, showing the locations of places in North America. From Gottlob Hebold, Das Brittische Reich in America; oder: Kurzgefasste Beschreibung der engländischen Pflanzstädte samt ihrer Macht, Geschichte und Handlung iin [sic] Nord-America (1761)
The Rogue Reverend: A Tale of Deception and Fraud (part 3 of 3).
(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 […]
The Rogue Reverend: A Tale of Deception and Fraud (part 2 of 3)
(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 […]
History’s Footnote Problem
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, […]
No, there is no “s” at the end of “New Netherland”
by Michael J. Douma Like many nineteenth-century New Yorkers of Dutch-descent, the historical scholar John Romeyn Brodhead was bothered by the poor treatment the Dutch had received in the written histories of colonial America. In these histories, there was one “vulgar error” in particular that drew his ire. This was, he said, the “absurd use […]
On the Success of the Teach-to-Mastery Approach
My students’ essays this semester are, on average, better written than the average published op-ed or academic journal article. You might joke that academic journals set a low bar, and some of them do, that’s true, but the writing in most major journals in the field of history is pretty good (the American Historical Review […]
Michael J Douma 