history museums pragmatic historian

How to Visit a Museum

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…

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history pragmatic historian

History Provides a Baseline for STEM

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…

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history pragmatic historian

Using History to Motivate Change

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…

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