Ever go to a museum, especially a large museum with multiple floors and endless exhibits, and run around frantically trying to take everything in? It’s an exercise in brain overload and exhaustion. Being a museum person, you’d think I’d know better, but I’m often tempted to look and look and look until I’m frazzled. I don’t want to miss anything! But, in my effort not to miss anything, I end up absorbing nothing, which makes…
The public education system in the United States has been focused on STEM (science, technology, engineering & math) for a number of years now, with humanities subjects like history and art taking a back seat or being cut altogether. Ostensibly, we are doing this because the STEM fields need employees. While I’ve never agreed that our public education system is about serving as a training ground solely for the purpose of capitalistic endeavors, even employers…
While the title of this post may not exactly match the language at the top of History’s Hierarchy of Purpose … Using the Past to Shape the Future … the sentiment is the same. There is a lot you can do with history to shape the future, which is why I am now on blog post #3 regarding the subject. When I got the initial idea for this post, I was thinking about how our…
As an artist and writer, I am constantly looking for inspiration. What should I make next? What should I write next? Having worked in the history field for over 20 years, I’ve come to realize that I’ll never run out of inspiration if I keep looking to the past. The past helps me create now. The past will help me create in the future. I’ve been infinitely inspired by articles in old newspapers for my…
We’ve been climbing History’s Hierarchy of Purpose and at last we have reached the top – Using the Past to Shape the Future. This is the juicy part, the really fun purpose to which we can intentionally use history. When I start putting my mind to it, I can think of many, many ways to use the past to shape the future. I’ll talk about a number of them over the next several posts, but…