Columbus, Indians, and the Guanches

When Christopher Columbus strode ashore in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, he famously called the indigenous people he met “Indians.” The main talking points of his legacy are still the consequences of his arrival for the people who bear that incongruous label: millions would suffer and die, and cultures would struggle to endure the …

Should it stay, or should it go?

No matter what you write, if you’ve done your research thoroughly, your first draft is probably going to be too long. If you’ve never written a book, the thought of having at least 80,000 words to fill might seem daunting rather than a restriction. For people who have asked me to help them write a …

Microbiography: Turn over all stones

In my blog post on book breaking (and the version published by Slate), I wrote of two items that ought to belong in an academic historian’s tool kit: narrative and microbiography. Narrative requires a blog post of its own (but no, I did not mean writing fancy sentences and dumbing down serious work for the …

Pseudohistorians claim scholars are hostile to innovative ideas. Do they have a point?

Spend any time (it won’t take very long) listening to or reading the words of people in the pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology worlds, and you will encounter a standard riposte to scholarly objections to their theories and evidence. The scholarly world is a closed shop that suppresses innovative ideas of outsiders—even of its own accredited members—in …

Book breaking, and book mending

Ship breaking in Bangladesh. Source: http://www.travelyourassoff.com/2012/01/abandon-ship-chittagong-ship-breaking.html In January 2018, Karin Wulf, a history professor at William and Mary and director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, wrote an instalment for her blog, Vast Early America, entitled “Efficient Reading”. Professor Wulf tossed a lifeline to doctoral students everywhere struggling with the overwhelming impossibility …

Shingwauk’s Reading: Dighton Rock and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Troubled Ethnology

Excerpt from Chapter 7 of The Place of Stone In the summer of 1839, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the superintendent of Indian affairs for the Michigan territory, arrived at his post at Michilimackinac, the island on the strait between lakes Michigan and Huron. Schoolcraft had been active in ethnology and philology in the United States for …

Double Double: Chapter 3

Tim’s Tale: From hockey sticks to stir sticks In September 2011, I walked into a co-branded outlet of Cold Stone Creamery and Tim Hortons on West 42rd, just west of Times Square in midtown Manhattan, and ordered a medium coffee. The server surprised me by handing me a cup held in a sleeve, which you …