Thomas Doerflinger
American historian (1952–2015)
Thomas M. Doerflinger (1952–2015) was an American historian.
Life
He is the son of William Main Doerflinger.
He was a MCEAS Dissertation Fellow, at Harvard University in 1978-1979.
He trained as a historian at Princeton and Harvard.
He died on August 23, 2015.
Awards
1987 Bancroft Prize
1980 Bowdoin Prize for Graduate Essays
Works
"How to Succeed in Business: An Exchange", The New York Review of Books, July 11, 1996
"Rural Capitalism in Iron Country: Staffing a Forest Factory, 1808–1815", William & Mary Quarterly, January 2002
"The Antilles Trade of the Old Regime: A Statistical Overview", Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Winter 1976
A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia. UNC Press. 1986. ISBN 978-0-8078-4946-0.
Thomas M. Doerflinger; Jack L. Rivkin (1987).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Thomas Doerflinger” is american historian (1952–2015). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Thomas, Doerflinger and American, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american historian (1952–2015)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7789007. VIAF identifies the subject as 72806844. The Library of Congress control number is n84217660. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952, 2015, 1978 and 1979.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Doerflinger” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.