Historians are explorers. Their terrain is the past, Vast, deep, complicated. Their tools: Archival materials, Three-dimensional artifacts, Places and structures. Their discoveries are wondrous, Though-provoking, Potentially dangerous, Life-changing. They collect the past, Analyze it, And bring it into the present, So that it remains useful Now And into the future. Historians reanimate the dead. >>> Want adventure? Become a historian!
During the last meeting of our local writers group, we did a speedy writing assignment. This happens when group members run out of things to share. We didn’t have any sort of assignment prepared in advance, so we took the first line of a book one of our members had with her and used that as a writing prompt. The book was The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe and the first line was: “The…
This post is likely to ruffle a few feathers. Let’s ruffle away, shall we? (If you are a donor to museum collections and you’d like to avoid the ruffling, see the caveat at the end of this post.) “If You Don’t Take It, It Will End Up in a Landfill” I can’t tell you how many times people who’ve donated items for museum collections have said, “If you don’t take it, it will end up…