Between 2013 and 2014, the Center for the Future of Museums of the American Alliance of Museums offered an online program to teach willing museum staff how to think like futurists. Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, put out the call for students and led us through this course by providing us with assignments digitally. Obviously, I was one of those willing students and I delighted in the course,…
Which of these things is not like the others? With my penchant for clocks as the visual theme for The Pragmatic Historian, does today’s featured image of drums come as a surprise? It may seem on the surface that clocks and drums have nothing to do with each other, but both are timekeeping devices. Clocks tell us what time it is within the day, but drums establish the tempo for other musicians to follow. The…
History is everywhere. I’ve always kind of known that, but since starting The Pragmatic Historian and purposely looking for it, I want to shout it from the rooftops: “HISTORY IS EVERYWHERE!!” Where the Past Begins Within the past week, I finished reading Amy Tan’s memoir, “Where the Past Begins.” If the title isn’t enough to convince you that she used history to write the book (the word “Past” is a dead giveaway), she opens the…