history pragmatic historian

How to Get Children Interested in History

As a longtime museum worker who has observed many children within a museum setting over the years and the parent of 3 adult children who all show an interest in various aspects of history and love visiting museums, I have a few insights about how to cultivate an interest in history in children. For your convenience (and to play nicely with Google’s algorithms), I present these insights in list form, however none of them is…

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pragmatic historian time

Timekeeping with Fingers and Sun

When I was a kid, someone taught me a nifty little timekeeping technique involving my fingers and the sun. If you hold your fingers between the setting sun and the horizon, you can estimate the time for full sunset by counting 15 minutes for each of your fingers between the sun and the horizon line. For the photo above, there are 4 fingers between the sun and horizon, so there is about an hour before…

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history pragmatic historian

44 Pages & a Long-Standing Mission

Remember when PBS was THE domain of documentaries? No longer. Aside from cable, which we cut years ago, Netflix has a fabulous rotation of documentaries on all sorts of topics, even arcane, who-would-ever-think-to-make-a-movie-about-that? documentaries. A few nights ago, my husband and I watched 44 Pages, a documentary about Highlights magazine. Remember Highlights? If you have visited any doctor’s or dentist’s office in the past 6 or 7 decades, you have likely flipped through Highlights, especially…

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