History, History Everywhere

The context folder overflows:

* "Micro-history at its best" is EH.net reviewer Christina Lubinski's take on Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century. Author Andrew Popp drew on some 200 John Shaw family letters for an up-close-and-personal account of English international hardware wholesaler of the early 1800s.


* "What has changed [in the last 200 years] and what hasn't?" asks historian/blogger Dan Allosso over at The Historical Society as he wraps up his book, An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy. Part of his answer is the same as my mom (and I) would have given: "Day to day life is so much easier now, that it’s hard for readers to appreciate the sheer work that went into staying alive from year to year in the early 19th century." When Civil War pension papers discuss whether a veteran could do "a full day's work," they're talking about an amount of physical labor that few if any of us could perform.


* In the New York Review of Books, Fred Anderson reviews Bernard Bailyn's The Barbarous Years, an unsparing portrait of the first 75 years of European settlement of eastern North America:

Here the years from 1600 to 1675 appear as an American nightmare of savagery, suffering, and squalor. European colonists, seeking to establish order, created "confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize abnormal situations and to recapture lost worlds, in the process tearing apart the normalities of the people whose world they had invaded."

Whatever the issues with this viewpoint, it's at the very least a necessary corrective to the conventional pieties of old-style genealogy. (My 8-great grandfather got his land in colonial Connecticut by participating in the 1637 expedition that burned to death hundreds of Pequot women and children in their village.) I'm ordering this one now.




Andrew Popp, Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012).

 Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (New York: Knopf, 2013).




Harold Henderson, "History, History Everywhere," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 March 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

History for Non-Readers

Colorado State University Pueblo historian Jonathan Rees writes over at The Historical Society:

 . . . humanities professors faced with non-reading students have to teach their recalcitrant readers the kinds of reading skills that they’ve never learned.

. . . In their classic How to Read a Book Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren speak of Elementary Reading, Inspectional Reading, and Analytical Reading.  To get students to that third level, you have to read with them.  Open the book during class.  Make them read aloud to the class.  Discuss the implications of those ideas.

Rees is also the author of the recently published Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life, covering the US 1877-1929 (and available as an e-book). His list of "case studies" makes me suspect that even those of us who think we know some history may benefit from reading it . . . out loud or otherwise. (If it's as good as it could be, I might agitate for a prequel covering 1845-1877.)



Jonathan Rees, "Bend, Don't Break," The Historical Society, posted 26 November 2012 (http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2012/11/bend-dont-break.html : accessed 26 November 2012).


Jonathan Rees, Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life: A Brief Introduction (Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2012).


Harold Henderson, "History for Non-Readers," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

We'll Always Need Advanced Genealogy Education

Stanford historian Sam Wineburg, interviewed by Randall Stephens over at The Historical Society blog, explains another reason why good classes in evidence evaluation, analysis, and correlation are unlikely ever to become unnecessary. Even today, even the best students are not learning this stuff.

Wineburg describes how he uses a popular book that many history students (but few professional historians) love, the late Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States 1492-Present.

Please note (as some of the commenters on the original post do not) that the issue here is not whether Zinn's claims are true/false/absurd/other, nor whether his book on balance has value, but how to think about any historical claims. If you know the book you probably have an opinion on those questions too; please share it elsewhere.

I have students take a claim and then follow the chain of evidence for it back to its source. This is not easy with Zinn, as the book contains no footnotes. So, we have to figure out where Zinn gets his information by looking at his bibliography (there is no archival research in the book—all of Zinn's references are to secondary sources). So, I have students go back to the books Zinn read, and then have them go to the notes in these books to try to figure out how Zinn has used this information and whether its original context has been preserved.

This course is part of Stanford's freshmen seminar program, so my students are young people who only months before had been in high school. They have never experienced anything like this before. Nearly all of them are survivors of AP history, where history class meant memorizing copious amounts of factual information to do well on the 80 multiple choices items so they could get into a college like Stanford. . . . Students know how to find information but many are ill-equipped to answer whether that information should be believed in the first place.

Sound familiar? From our point of view, the roots of genealogical malpractice run deep.

Randall Stephens, "Teaching History to Undergrads: An Interview with Sam Wineburg,"The Historical Society, posted 29 October 2012 (http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2012/10/teaching-history-to-undergrads.html : accessed 30 October 2012).

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States 1492-Present (New York: HarperCollins, 1980-2003).


Harold Henderson, "We'll Always Need Advanced Genealogy Education," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Fur Trade Quarterly

This outfit is located a bit to the west of my personal definition of the Midwest, but it sounds way too good not to pass on. Would you pay good money to subscribe to a periodical called The Museum of the Fur Trade Quarterly?

Well, judging from what Heather Cox Richardson says at The Historical Society, you should. The focus on daily oddments -- a particular kind of tobacco, the indispensability of cats on the frontier -- how could a genealogist or microhistorian not love it?

The museum includes material on the Great Lakes and the War of 1812. Its book-publishing arm, the Fur Press, has begun publishing a projected six-volume encyclopedia of the fur trade:

1. Firearms of the Fur Trade (2011)
2. Gun Accessories & Hand Weapons of the Fur Trade
3. Tools & Utensils of the Fur Trade
4. Clothing & Textiles of the Fur Trade (2012)
5. Ornaments & Art Supplies of the Fur Trade
6. Provisions of the Fur Trade (2014)

If you're in the neighborhood -- Chadron, Dawes County, Nebraska, in the far northwestern corner of the state -- check it out. Meanwhile, if you're curious but don't want to subscribe based on a second-hand testimonial, in my part of the Midwest, Worldcat.org tells us that TMFTQ is held by the following libraries: the University of Notre Dame, Chicago Public, the Newberry, Allen County (Indiana), Michigan State University, and DePauw University.


Harold Henderson, "Fur Trade Quarterly," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 17 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Getting around in Rome, Wild West nuns, and more history items of potential interest

* Orbis at Stanford is the coolest thing I've seen in a while: a model of travel in the Roman Empire. "By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity." . . . Help me out, here, techies: how hard would this be to implement for, say, Connecticut in 1670, or Indiana in 1830? (Hat tip to Planetizen Newswire.)

* Farther west than this blog usually goes, the New York Times foretaste of Anne M. Butler's Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920 looks spicy. (Hat tip to Legal History Blog.)

* In which historians discover that there is always more of it, at The Historical Society -- and then they discuss family history too.

* You've heard of house histories -- how about a history of the multistory luxury co-op at 1540 North Lake Shore Drive on Chicago's Gold Coast, complete with the full history of the underlying land, vignettes of Chicago life in the course of its existence, and profiles of movers and shakers who lived there? Grace Dumelle's Heartland Historical Research Service has published the 113-page book. (Full disclosure: I did some work on it as a subcontractor.)



The History of 1540 North Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois (Chicago: Heartland Historical Research Service, 2012).


Harold Henderson, "Getting around in Rome, Wild West nuns, and more history items of potential interest," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Mis-understanding history

How many genealogists are better off than these poor students? A lot, I hope.

"Primary Sources"

If you haven't already, check out Dan Alosso's "Reading Primary Sources" posts at The Historical Society -- one on estate inventories, the other on bank notes. If you can get beyond the historian's entrenched and hopelessly imprecise terminology of "primary source," they're quite interesting, especially the one on bank notes. Inventories have tended to fall between the chairs of history and genealogy (some published will compilations purposely omitted them).

More great history books

Heather Cox Richardson has a wonderful post on The Historical Society's blog, in which she imagines an American history course built around four old classics and four new ones. Of course it warms my heart to hear more about fine books like Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom; Robert White's The Middle Ground; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale; and Robert Mazrim's The Sangamo Frontier: History and Archaeology in the Shadow of Lincoln.

What could be better than seeing old friends appreciated? Learning four more titles that I haven't yet read. I can hardly wait. Now I know where to spend my Christmas loot!

You don't read enough blogs...

...so here's a tip. I just bumped into The Historical Society blog (thanks to Legal History) and found:

* the post I went looking for, recommending Frank Luther Mott's 1947 Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (including many you never heard of, but chances are your ancestors did), and

* a discussion of who people were probably thinking of when they named kids "Darwin" in the early 19th century. Both posts by Dan Allosso.

There's more. For the historically-minded genealogist (which I hope is all of us), this looks like a keeper.

BTW, Mott's book appears to be searchable but not previewable on Google Books. Check your library or AbeBooks.