action challenge design ideas preservation

Down With Glassines!

When it comes to recycling, one of the biggest barriers to recycling specific materials is contamination. Contamination comes in the form of other materials being mixed in with the material that is bound for recycling. For example, if you’re trying to recycle a cardboard box and there is grease or oil on it (think pizza box), the box can’t be recycled because of the oil. In addition, the more materials an item is purposely made…

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Mourning Victims of the Pandemic – A Call to Action for Museums

      Since reading this Twitter thread by Kristin Rawls, it has been circling through my head. Within 8 tweets, Rawls has expressed the sad state of the United States of America during the COVID-19 pandemic, how we are collectively willing to reopen society and let tens of thousands more people die unnecessarily because we have been unwilling to mourn the loss of the tens of thousands who have already died. The thread points…

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Under Reconstruction

Hey, all, if you’re here and looking for The Pragmatic Historian or the former Mary E Warner websites, I’m working on blending the two sites and it’s a messy, messy process. I’m missing all my images, which is going to take some serious work to figure out. (Yes, I backed everything up, but WordPress isn’t importing them.) You can see I have lots of duplicates in menu items. Nothing is as pretty as it used…

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challenge history pragmatic historian

Did Past Epidemics Cause Social Distancing in Scandinavians?

March 13, 2020 A mere month ago I wasn’t thinking about COVID-19, let alone thinking of blogging about it. Now, it’s pretty much all I can think of, along with mitigation efforts to #FlattenTheCurve in order to slow the spread and not overwhelm our healthcare system. I’m writing this on Friday, March 13, 2020. It’s important to note the date because the situation is changing rapidly. We’ve got 14 people in the state who have…

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challenge history pragmatic historian

Book Review: Zero Waste Sewing

Normally, I post book reviews on my somewhat neglected personal blog at maryewarner.com (neglected because I spend most of my blogging energy here at The Pragmatic Historian). I’m making an exception in this case because the book I am reviewing, “Zero Waste Sewing” by Elizabeth Haywood, came to me because of this blog. Those of you who’ve been following along for a while might remember that I was attempting to make a bog coat, which…

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