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…
Which of these things is not like the others? With my penchant for clocks as the visual theme for The Pragmatic Historian, does today’s featured image of drums come as a surprise? It may seem on the surface that clocks and drums have nothing to do with each other, but both are timekeeping devices. Clocks tell us what time it is within the day, but drums establish the tempo for other musicians to follow. The…
The Importance of Dating Today on The Pragmatic Historian, we’re going to discuss dating advice. Lest you think this has suddenly become a venue along the lines of Emily Post, Miss Manners or Tinder, let me put your mind at ease. Dating in the context of history is more mundane than building a relationship with a potential romantic partner but, I’d argue, no less important. In my post History in Numbers, where I discuss the…
Now that I’ve worked through History’s Hiearchy of Purpose, it’s time for a lighthearted post. Since starting The Pragmatic Historian with its clock-themed photos, I’ve become obsessed with finding clocks out in the wild. Naturally, I started by taking glamour shots of the clocks we have in our house. We have a lot of clocks, most of them nonfunctioning, but that matters not at all for my purposes. Of course, eventually I was bound to…
I’ve been blogging madly these past few weeks, publishing 3 posts a week as I work to get my blog established. Mostly, this is a strategy that I hoped would allow Google to find and index The Pragmatic Historian quickly. My strategy seems to have worked. The blog shows up on the first page of Google results when you search for it by name. It’s #6 on the page, which isn’t too shabby. Now that…