I am irritated. I read a story on NPR News about a Pennsylvania guy who stole artifacts, mostly firearms, from about a dozen museums in the 1960s and ’70s. He got caught in 2018 after trying to sell one of the guns. His sentence? One day. One. Day. I am irritated because this sentence shows how unseriously the courts, and by extension, society in general, take thefts from museums. Oh, well, it’s just an artifact,…
The Scientific Method Show of hands. Who here has heard of the Scientific Method? Likely, without looking it up, most everyone could list a few of the steps involved with the Scientific Method. There’s coming up with a question and making a hypothesis and testing the hypothesis and … how many steps are there? Even if you can’t list all the steps in order, you’ve at least heard of the Scientific Method because it has…
It Started with an Email I got an interesting question by email recently. It concerned the use of profanity in a historic document … should it be used or not, specifically within a direct quote? Or, should the swear words, specifically fuck and shit, have asterisks replacing letters thusly: f*** and s***? My reply was that if the direct quote illuminates the history in some way, the swear words should be used as is, spelled…
I began my job at a county historical society in Minnesota over 20 years ago. I seem to be saying that a lot lately, but I’ve reached a point where I’ve served enough time that I can look back and pick up on themes within my work. Path to Museum Succession Planning A big theme has been succession planning, only I didn’t know I was doing this from the beginning. When I started, I was…