Mar Hicks, a historian of technology who tweets @histoftech, posted a thread with her thoughts on having read a couple of biographies about Steve Jobs. One was by his first daughter; the other by this daughter’s mother. This particular tweet from the thread is illuminating: Yes, women’s lives have typically been left out of historical documentation. If you read obituaries from the late 1800s and early 1900s, if there is an obituary for a…
Bought a set of socks from Amazon before the holiday season. They were marketed under the brand name of Lovely Annie’s, which I thought was a delightful name. Strange thing, though. While I was searching for warm, knee-high socks to buy, I kept running across what appeared to be photos of the same set of socks (sometimes with 4 pair, sometimes with 5) with different brand names. I mean, these photos were identical, not just…
If at first you don’t succeed, blah, blah, blah … Regular and observant readers of The Pragmatic Historian may have noticed that I had an email subscriber form in a couple of spots on the website a while ago. I can’t tell you how long I had them available, but my supposedly occasional email newsletter was called TickTock. How incredibly uninspiring! I wasn’t keen on the name when I chose it, but I was trying…