A Brief History of the Pencil

One of the unexpected things I learned during our visit to Nuremberg over the holidays is that the city was the home to the first mass-produced graphite lead pencils, beginning in 1662. Before we visited Nuremberg, I hadn’t given the history of pencils much thought.* In fact, the only piece of pencil history that I…

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Putting Women’s History on the Map

This is less of a blog post and more of a public service announcement. The National Trust for Historic Preservation wants to identify one thousand places where American women made history in celebration of the 100th anniversary of women getting the vote. You can find all the details here: https://savingplaces.org/where-women-made-history The trick is not going…

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