Okay, one more post related to the Minnesota Alliance of Local History Museums conference, then I will be on to other things. (See how much fodder a conference can provide for a blog?) While I work at a museum and my employer could have paid for my attendance at the conference, I chose to pay for the conference and its related expenses (hotel, mileage, meals) personally. Why? One major reason, but there is an ancillary…
In my last blog post, I discussed attending the 2019 annual conference of the Minnesota Alliance of Local History Museums at Treasure Island Resort & Casino. While that post covered the sessions I attended, I also led a session and figured that warranted its own blog post, which is what this post is devoted to. My session, “Leaving Breadcrumbs: Succession Planning the Hansel & Gretel Way,” appears on page 20 of the conference guide. My…
‘Tis conference season in the Minnesota museum world. It starts in early spring and runs through the fall, with all sorts of fascinating conferences available for further education and networking. I’m not terribly keen on the term “networking” in the context of conferences, partially because networking has such a glad-handy, inauthentic reputation, partially because conferences often don’t give people time to network, and partially because folks in the Minnesota museum field tend to be toiling…
Here at The Pragmatic Historian, my main purpose is to show people how to use history in everyday life. Actually, most of us already use history on a daily basis, so my true purpose is to point out what is so obvious that no one sees it anymore. Much of the time, history is used in positive ways. It is used to build understanding and empathy between people, provide inspiration, teach us critical thinking, help…
In this week’s post, I continue my discussion of Margaret Renkl’s article “Waking Up to History” in the New York Times. To see where this began, read last Monday’s post. Are Fiber Arts a Way to Subjugate Women? Along with being a public historian, I am a fiber artist and have been since I was a child. I learned some from my mom, who crochets extraordinary afghans, but I was also encouraged in my self-taught…