It has happened. I’m writing a blog post after my self-imposed deadline of Monday morning at 8:33 CST. Normally, I pre-write and schedule my blog posts a week or several days ahead. Due to a giant project at work, repainting a room at home, and a couple of snowstorms (including one last night), my time has been captured by other things. Also, because these other things (including the giant project at work) have been physical,…
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…
While the title of this post may not exactly match the language at the top of History’s Hierarchy of Purpose … Using the Past to Shape the Future … the sentiment is the same. There is a lot you can do with history to shape the future, which is why I am now on blog post #3 regarding the subject. When I got the initial idea for this post, I was thinking about how our…
As an artist and writer, I am constantly looking for inspiration. What should I make next? What should I write next? Having worked in the history field for over 20 years, I’ve come to realize that I’ll never run out of inspiration if I keep looking to the past. The past helps me create now. The past will help me create in the future. I’ve been infinitely inspired by articles in old newspapers for my…
We’ve been climbing History’s Hierarchy of Purpose and at last we have reached the top – Using the Past to Shape the Future. This is the juicy part, the really fun purpose to which we can intentionally use history. When I start putting my mind to it, I can think of many, many ways to use the past to shape the future. I’ll talk about a number of them over the next several posts, but…