I recently ran across an article on my Twitter feed shared by Century Past History (@lienhart85). The article, called “Why I Am a Historian: A Response to Mary Beth Norton,” is by Lillian Guerra, professor of Cuban and Caribbean history at the University of Florida. Compelled to History Guerra explains how studying history was a necessity for her because she wanted to understand the racism she experienced as a Cuban immigrant in the United States.…
Within organizations, there are people who enjoy playing with numbers, and then there is everybody else. Those in the Everybody Else category react to financial statements with a glazed look at best or utter terror at worst. Often, people who feel they don’t have a hope of understanding financial statements are disconnected from the source of the numbers on those statements. The numbers are merely theoretical to them, which makes them difficult to grasp. Here’s…
It feels like I’m stating the obvious, but history teaches all sorts of thinking skills. One of these is that it enhances our ability to see patterns. When you’re just going through your day-to-day life, it’s easy to miss larger patterns, particularly when you don’t compare what’s happening locally to events on a statewide, national or global level. It’s the myopia of living in the now. When you take the time to investigate an historical…
I recently watched the PBS NOVA documentary “Dawn of Humanity” on Netflix. This almost 2-hour exploration of anthropologists excavating a cache of bones deep in a South African cave was riveting. The bones turned out to be from a previously-unknown species of hominid. Because the cache held the bones of so many individuals, the paleoanthropologists studying the cave surmised it was an intentional burial site. The documentary features Dr. Lee Berger, the lead paleoanthropologist for the…
I finished reading a fabulous book on the history of color and colorants called “The Secret Lives of Color” by Kassia St. Clair. The design of the book is, appropriately enough, full of color, from the multi-colored polka dots on the front cover to the color bands on the page edges. Deep dives into a particular topic over the course of history, such as this book presents, provide a concentrated look at the development of…