Tidying Up with Marie Kondo Have you caught the KonMari fever yet? I have. My husband and I have been watching the new Netflix show “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.” The KonMari Method is Kondo’s branded process of sorting and folding and arranging possessions. She has been passionate about tidying since she was a child and on the show she will often exclaim, “I love a mess!” Kondo wrote a couple of books a number…
It Started with an Email I got an interesting question by email recently. It concerned the use of profanity in a historic document … should it be used or not, specifically within a direct quote? Or, should the swear words, specifically fuck and shit, have asterisks replacing letters thusly: f*** and s***? My reply was that if the direct quote illuminates the history in some way, the swear words should be used as is, spelled…
Mar Hicks, a historian of technology who tweets @histoftech, posted a thread with her thoughts on having read a couple of biographies about Steve Jobs. One was by his first daughter; the other by this daughter’s mother. This particular tweet from the thread is illuminating: Yes, women’s lives have typically been left out of historical documentation. If you read obituaries from the late 1800s and early 1900s, if there is an obituary for a…
If at first you don’t succeed, blah, blah, blah … Regular and observant readers of The Pragmatic Historian may have noticed that I had an email subscriber form in a couple of spots on the website a while ago. I can’t tell you how long I had them available, but my supposedly occasional email newsletter was called TickTock. How incredibly uninspiring! I wasn’t keen on the name when I chose it, but I was trying…
My brain has a tendency to connect the most disparate things. But isn’t that where creativity comes from? So, let’s forge ahead with today’s blog post! An Enthusiastic Blacksmith Over the holidays while our kids were home, our Eldest Son introduced us to the videos of Alec Steele. Alec Steele is a young British blacksmith who produces YouTube videos showing people his projects and experiments in his shop. He is excitable, sharing his craft with…