When it comes to writing, there are some articles that take a while to develop, sometimes months, sometimes years, because there are pieces missing that you sense are missing, but you haven’t yet found them. Such is the case with today’s blog post. In December 2020, I made a note about “Moms as social glue – keeping families together across space & time.” This is something I’ve seen in my family, particularly on my dad’s…
In this week’s post, I continue my discussion of Margaret Renkl’s article “Waking Up to History” in the New York Times. To see where this began, read last Monday’s post. Are Fiber Arts a Way to Subjugate Women? Along with being a public historian, I am a fiber artist and have been since I was a child. I learned some from my mom, who crochets extraordinary afghans, but I was also encouraged in my self-taught…
In case it hasn’t become apparent yet, I’m using clocks as the visual theme for The Pragmatic Historian. What better way to illustrate the uses of history than through a practical tool that helps us mark time? When I decided on the clock theme, I ran around the house, looking for and gathering up clocks in order to properly photograph them. I was shocked, absolutely shocked with how many clocks I found: 28 of them!…
“Nonprofit With Balls” is a blog that’s all that and a bag of chips (with some unicorns thrown in for good measure). Its posts, written by Vu Le (pronounced “voo lay” – because I know how to read an About page), offer a typically irreverent, but uncomfortably honest look at the nonprofit world. Vu’s humor makes the uncomfieness easier to bear. (And, frankly, darn it, we do-gooders are not the dour types that we are…