Category History Methods
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 […]
Book review: Mike Maxwell, Future-Focused History Teaching (Maxwell Learning, 2018)
Mike Maxwell is reader of this blog and a fellow historian who sent me a copy of his new book. The general message of the book is that history education, specifically at the high school level, is a mess. The first 55 pages of the book diagnose the problem, which is that history education does […]
You can’t spell “onafhankelijkheid” without the letter “ij”
In 1850, the Sheboygan Nieuwsbode was the only Dutch language newspaper in the United States. The editor, Jacob Quintus, was proud of his new nation, its history and freedoms. To educate the Dutch immigrants about their country, he published a Dutch translation of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, this seems not to have been […]
Cato Daily Podcast: What Is Classical Liberal History
I was invited by Caleb Brown to talk about one of my new books. We talk history methods and the place of classical liberal history in historical research. https://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-daily-podcast/what-classical-liberal-history https://www.cato.org/longtail-iframe/node/79668/field_longtail_player/0
Book Review: Marshall T. Poe, How to Read a History Book: The Hidden History of History (Zero Books, 2018)
There have been a rash of history books recently with incorrect titles. Sam Weinburg’s Why Study History when its Already on Your Phone has very little to do with justifying learning of history in the age of the smart phone, and Alex Rosenburg’s How History Gets it Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addictions to Stories […]
Book Review: David C. Krakauer, John Lewis Gaddis, Kenneth Pomeranz, eds. History, Big History History & Metahistory (Santa Fe Institute, 2017)
The Santa Fe Institute sounds like an Elon Musk/ Lex Luther style lair, where the brightest thinkers come together to hatch a scheme for controlling the planet. What many of the participants of the book want to control is the shape and scope of historical narrative. They want history to be big, to cover grand […]
The State of the History Discipline (and where have the good history blogs gone?)
A new report has historians in a tizzy. The history discipline has lost more undergraduate majors than any other discipline in the country. Meanwhile, over at the History News Network half of the lead articles (1, 2, 3, and 4) and almost every blog (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ) is about Trump […]
Book Review: Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (University of Chicago Press, 2017)
The genre of historians writing about their own field is large and growing. Some of these are quite good, like John Burrow’s A History of Histories, which traces historical writing from the Greeks to the present, or, more relevant to most active historians, Georg Iggers’ Historiography in the 20th century. But since I’ve also read […]
Time, where did you come from, where did you go?
Time flows up and down, or in a circle (a nautilus perhaps); it flows from left to right. Where time comes from, and where it goes, depends on the observer. Every time I present my work on spatial conceptions of time, I ask students to draw their own examples. Not everyone has an image that […]
Michael J Douma 