Category: Michael

I love maps. I love writing about them. I love rescuing them. I love reading about them on the internet. I love to look at them hanging on walls. I love to touch them, to trace imagined journeys by fingertip — sliding a digit over the Alps to Innsbruck, along the high passes of the Pamirs…

In the same vein as my previous post on New World Demographics, I would also like to share another controversial historical thesis. This is also the product of my teaching, but more recently from teaching two sections of Military History to 1789 and Introduction to European History, both of which cover (however briefly) the Hunnic…

The crux of this post will be to introduce a new topic for this blog; the History of Pirates, Bandits, and Brigands. As a professor of world history, I have found success in teaching a survey course of such outsiders and supposedly unethical persons throughout history, from the Sea Peoples of the Late Bronze Age to…

Introduction I want to talk about teaching history using Wikipedia, but not in the way I believe the average person would expect (and worry about). First I should explain the context in which I developed this new project, this new pedagogical exercise. My professional career teaching outside of my graduate institution only began in the…

Following an introduction to the idea that we actually have no genetic relationship with many of our direct ancestors, we will consider what this means for the promise from genetic-testing companies of finding your “ethnic heritage.” Imagine that you are on a theater stage, like the one pictured. You are standing in a theater modeled…

As the result of teaching many years of introductory college history courses, I have tried to keep fresh in the literature. In teaching this course, I have begun to think that the history of Native Americans in the United States is missing a very important conclusion from the data: that our understanding of “tribal society” represents…

I wrote this blog post for the Central Eurasian Studies Society in 2015 and with the passing of their blog, this post has no home. With the ephemeral nature of the Internet, aren’t I just delaying the inevitable? Can the subaltern draw a map? This post attempts no answer to the question, but rather illustrates…

(This blog post I wrote for the Central Eurasian Studies Society in July 2015 has now become an excellent lesson in the ephemeral nature of the Internet. When I wrote it almost ten years ago it was to celebrate the availabilty of a set of maps, digitized and available from a University in Sweden… and…

Previously I wrote that I would use the blog for writing practice, more specifically for writing things outside the scope of my dissertation. Today I am making an exception: this is an attempt to write coherently about the subject of my next dissertation chapter. My next chapter is about the poem/song now commonly known by…

Johan Gustaf Renat (1682-1744) was an amazing historical figure, a Swedish man with an uncanny skill for survival in strange environments who traveled further afield into Turko-Mongol territory than practically any other European in his generation. He has left an interesting trail of documents and traces in others’ accounts of the time, but still one…