Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog

Historian Scott E. Casper writes about US biography in the 1800s -- not just high-toned biographies of famous people, but also the "m...

Maya Jasanoff in the New York Review of Books , reviewing Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdo...

I haven't attended this institute, but I have heard good things about it, and the enrollment deadline is close: Don’t Miss Your Opport...

Historians have issues with evidence evaluation, too. Here's the nautical metaphor that China scholar Jonathan D. Spence used to introd...

The first thing we learn about federal records is that very few of them are indexed by name. To make progress, we usually need to know the m...

How do we tell somebody we looked and didn't find anything? Very thoroughly -- more thoroughly even than if we had found something. ...

A new task reminded me of how easy genealogy can seem when everyone is where they're supposed to be, the census records are consistent...