history law museums pragmatic historian preservation

Taking History Seriously

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,…

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history music pragmatic historian

Duran Duran – “Keep Moving Into the Future But Acknowledge Your Past”

Over the past week my Twitter feed has been burning up with news of Duran Duran. It’s almost as though they’ve released a new album …. And they have! The album “Future Past” dropped on October 22, 2021, the fifteenth studio album for one of my all-time favorite bands. Whoever is operating Duran Duran’s Twitter account is doing a marvelous job of keeping fans updated on the band’s current media appearances to promote the album.…

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history ideas pragmatic historian thought fodder

Now & Then: A Useful History Podcast

One of the most important uses of history is to use it to work ourselves out of predicaments we are facing RIGHT NOW. It’s easy to assume that because history is about what happened in the past, we can set it aside. That it has nothing to say to us now because conditions were different in the past. Except that humanity seems to cycle through the same sorts of challenges even when presented with what…

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