Category History Methods
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 […]
Ghost Tallies in the Census
In my previous post I explained that historians have overcounted slaves in the New York census of 1830. Instead of the traditional count of 75 or 76, I estimated that there were in fact only between 38 and 51 slaves actually tallied on the census forms. One reason for the latter-day counting error, evident in […]
Foreign Soldiers in the U.S. Civil War (Dutch, German, Danish, English, etc)
Last year, I and my two co-authors Anders Rasmussen and Robert Faith published an article (in the well-regarded Journal of American Ethnic History) about foreign-born men who were forced against their will into the Union army during the American Civil War. In 1862-1863, at the peak of “impressment” claims, over one thousand men complained that […]
What is “Dad History”? Giving a Label to a Popular Genre of History Writing
About a week ago, there was an active post on the r/History subreddit about “Dad History.” Some of the responses suggest that the original post had just coined the term “Dad History”, and this may very well be the case, because I find little use of the term elsewhere online. Dad History is mostly “Blokes, […]
Michael J Douma 