I fell in love with history in second grade on a field trip to a pioneer’s cabin near Estes Park, Colorado. I was such a history nerd growing up, I wore a calico dress and bonnet around - even as late as middle school. I read books about history, watched period pieces, wrote short stories about history, and urged my family to do something history-related on every vacation. I majored in U.S. History (1865-present) in undergrad, then went back for a Master’s Degree. Although I don’t use my degree on a regular basis, I am still a major history nerd. I only watch period pieces, I volunteer at two local historical museums, I voraciously read history books, I’m writing a historical fiction novel, and I’m teaching workshops on historical crafting.
Historical Crafting Workshops
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Purchase Your Spot in a Workshop!
Purchase your spot in the January Rag Rug Workshop!
This hour and a half workshop will teach you several methods for making rugs out of strips of leftover or re-purposed fabric. No skills necessary! Supplied are provided, but if you want to bring some of your own special fabric, you are welcome to! (This reservation is refundable only up until 10 days before the workshop. Reservation is transferrable, however.)
History Book Reading List
In graduate school I wrote a paper analyzing high school U.S. history textbooks for the presence of women, Native Americans, African Americans, and other minorities. These groups appeared mostly in sidebars and “special feature” sections, and so were separated from the main narrative of U.S. History. These groups had indexes in the back because how else would you find the scattered mentions of them in the massive tome of American History? Tellingly, “white people” and “men” had no index in the back.
The adult equivalent to the “special feature” sidebars in our high school textbooks are the special months for each group — Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Pride Month. Each month we close the box on one “special feature” of history, and pull out facts about women, or Asian Americans, then ready our rainbow flags. What troubles me is that America uses these special feature months as an excuse to not teach about these groups in “real” history class. The actual history of the United States is the history of women, racial and ethnic minorities, poor and working-class people, handicapped people, and LGBTQIA people — they are not a sidebar to wealthy white men’s history. It behooves each of us to know this history, even if we weren’t taught it in school. We must educate ourselves.
Click on each book then hover your cursor over the image to get a brief description. Enjoy!
