Our Journey, Day 64

I had a conversation with my department chair yesterday, regarding my professional development plan. He seemed to understand where I was coming from but still thought a single page was too short. We talked it over and came to agreement that I could write some slightly more detailed descriptions of the things I had put in bulleted lists. That's the way I typically do it in my PDPs, so this wasn't something new. But I'm usually doing so much that my bullet lists go on for several pages. We also agreed I could write a more thorough narrative of my thinking around the research and writing element, since that's something I'm still quite serious about but will need to rethink how I do it.

The issue is that if I'm not going to be a professor, there's not much point writing a conference paper, a monograph for an academic press, or a journal article. These are the typical output goals in this section of the professional development plan. But people who aren't in the academy don't go to conferences or submit articles or manuscripts to academic presses. Even people who remain in the academy often try to transition from academic publishing to popular or "trade" presses as soon as they can, to increase their potential readerships. For example, Heather Cox Richardson's first two books were published by the Harvard University Press, her third by Yale, and then for her fourth she switched to Basic Books. When you make a shift like that, there are some differences in the topics you choose, the ways you write, and the sources you use that are relevant but probably deserve a longer exploration. Heather admitted in a writing seminar I had with her when she was finishing up the first trade press book that as you get busy with work and family, it's much more difficult to travel to remote archives to do really extensive primary research.

My three current writing projects are a history of the great northern white pine forest and the American and Canadian lumber and paper industries, a history of transatlantic secular radicalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a history of oligarchy and populism that spans and connects the first and second Gilded Ages in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I had imagined the first two (which are further along) would have been candidates for research travel to the east coast (lumber industry) and to London (secular radicals) during a sabbatical year in 2025.

The support of an income during a year devoted to research and writing would certainly have made those projects attainable and it would have been natural to write those books for an audience of professional historians. I still would have tried to tell an engaging story that would interest general readers, but I might have submitted the manuscripts to academic publishers. It's unlikely I'd make as much headway with such a press, as a former academic. But the good news is that as a PhD with six years of university teaching and a book in the Yale University Press's catalog, I now have the platform I lacked when I told an agent in 2010 that I wanted to pitch a book about the British secular radical, Charles Bradlaugh.

That's not to say I'll necessarily pitch my three current projects to trade presses. I do think I'll rework them, but possibly for other types of media including self-publishing. And actually, the challenges of rethinking these projects as popular histories are interesting. I think the research requirements will be about the same, so I don't think these qualify for the "fewer trips to archives" or digital archives model Heather had described. Maybe I could write the Gilded Age book with sources I could access online. The bigger challenges are the scope, purpose, and structure.

Generally, I think it's probably going to be necessary to widen the scope of each of these projects to make them attractive to a broad, popular audience. For example, a journal or an academic publisher might have been interested in a regional history of the Michigan-Wisconsin-Minnesota lumber industry in the final few decades (1890s to 1920s) at the western edge of the great pine forest. A trade press would probably want a story that covered the entire forest and lumber industry from its beginning at the Atlantic coast in the 18th century, at least to its end in Minnesota in the 1920s if not its jump to California and the Pacific Northwest and its transition to the pulp and paper industry. And what about an online audience?

The purpose of these histories would also be different. An academic product would typically seek to contribute something to a historiographical dialogue. My goal is usually to try to add a new perspective and "complicate" an interpretation. For example, Peppermint Kings argued that rural business was more complicated than usually depicted, that essence peddlers were much more prevalent and important than had previously been understood, and that banking looked different from the periphery than historians had understood it from the center; as well as updating, enhancing, and correcting the stories told in local histories of the peppermint industry in the three regions where it flourished in the nineteenth century. I tried to tell interesting stories of the very colorful personalities I discovered along the way, but the point of the book (as of the dissertation it came from) was an "intervention" into the narratives and interpretations of nineteenth-century American history. A new history, written for a popular audience, wouldn't have to engage as directly with the historiography. It would, I think, have to tell readers something they didn't know or show them a way of looking at events that hadn't been obvious to them. The goal of this would be partly to entertain and partly to encourage reflection on the other things people think they "know".

Finally, the structures of my three projects will need to change as well. If form follows function, it also responds to the media used to communicate it. Audiences are changing and expect different types of content today, especially in new media such as web sites, podcasts, and videos. In a sense, releasing my three writing projects from the constraints of the professional development paradigm (which was never a full-on "publish or perish" for me, but was inspired by that ideal) is a bit like freeing learning from the constraints of academic accreditation. If I'm writing for (or teaching) people who are only reading (or learning) what interests them, then I have two main goals: to interest the reader and to convince them that there's something at stake. The more I can fascinate people with settings, characters, and a narrative, the more likely they are to turn the page. The better I can make the case that my histories tell them something about the past that makes the present and future more understandable, the more likely they are to pick up a book or click on a link in the first place.

There are a lot of details I haven't yet worked out, about media, formats, pace, parts and wholes. But these are some of the big picture elements that are changing with my transition out of academic life.