Heather Cox Richardson

Untenured scholars are in a funny place: that gap between the old world and the new. Ten years ago, yes, blogging would convince many senior scholars that a junior person was not a serious academic because s/he was catering to a popular audience. Since then, the old world of the academy is crumbling, and while many departments have not yet caught up, others are aware they must move into the twenty-first century.

So will blog posts and tweets hurt your career? Maybe. But they can also help your career in very practical ways.

The first has to do with publishing. The gold standard for employment and for tenure remains a published book. When most senior scholars finished their doctorates, it was almost guaranteed that their dissertations would find academic publishers. In those days, university presses had standing contracts with university libraries that guaranteed automatic sales of a few thousand copies of each monograph that came out from a reputable press. Budget cuts over the last twenty years killed this system. No longer can an academic press be certain that libraries will buy their monographs. This means that they can’t accept everything that comes over the transom, making it harder than ever to get a book contract.

But you still need one to get tenure.

One of the ways to improve your chances of landing that contract is for you to make sure you have written a book that is of wider interest than to those in your immediately area of interest, one that a press thinks it will be able to sell. How can you do that? Engage with a wider audience on-line. Listen to questions. See which of your posts get a strong response. Are they written differently than your other work? Are they asking different questions? What does this tell you about your argument and your writing style? How can you speak more clearly to what is, after all, a self-selected audience of interested people?

Contracts also depend increasingly on your own networks. Do you have standing because you contribute to a popular blog? Are there lots of people who like to follow what you have to say? That will help convince a publisher that you’re worth a hearing.

An on-line presence might speak to an employer more directly. Blogging gives you an opportunity to present yourself on your own terms. Any diligent search committee will google you. A series of interesting blogs about teaching, for example, will never hurt your profile.

There are pitfalls to an on-line presence, of course. First of all, and above all, it’s important to remember that the very act of on-line work means your opponents can’t respond, and it’s unsporting, at best, to launch a tirade against someone who can’t answer. For the job market, this means it’s crazy to write intemperately about anyone or anything. This is a very small profession, and even if XYZ’s work infuriates you, there is no reason to call it out. XYZ will certainly have good friends at any institution at which you might interview, and they will not forget you have taken a pot shot (they googled you, remember?).

The exception to this rule, of course, is that if you feel strongly that you must take a stand either for or against something on principle, do it proudly and openly. And be prepared to defend your stand against opponents. Just don’t pick fights gratuitously.

On Twitter, the rules are like Facebook. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t post about how much you hate your students, or your colleagues, or any of the obvious rants that will ruin you with a committee. Don’t post endless self-absorbed pieces about what you’re eating or drinking or saying or thinking. But Twitter and Facebook are not just danger zones; they can also reflect you well. I follow a number of junior scholars on Twitter who are obviously tightly linked to their communities and to new scholarship, and who are struggling with really interesting intellectual issues. If one of them applied to my school, their Twitter presence would make them stand out.

The other major pitfall is that you cannot let your on-line presence keep you from producing more traditional scholarship. Blog and tweet, yes, but make sure those contributions to knowledge reflect and/or point back to your larger body of work. No search committee is going to consider a blog equivalent to a manuscript, but it very well might like to see a blog that augments the rest of what you do. Just don’t let on-line work suck all your time.

Here’s a newsflash: The internet is here to stay. The profession hasn’t yet caught up with its implications, but it must, and soon. Today’s junior scholars are in a vague zone between the past and the present, but that same vagueness offers them a great opportunity to shape the way historians use the world’s revolutionary new technologies.

Dan Allosso

So I’m thinking very seriously about getting to work on my story about a British radical named Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891).  Bradlaugh is the British equivalent of America’s “Great Agnostic,” Robert Ingersoll, only more so.  Unlike Ingersoll, Bradlaugh was extremely political—he was even elected to Parliament and prevented from taking his seat for six

Charles Bradlaugh

years by the conservative opposition because he could not take the religious oath of office.  I’ve been researching him, off and on, since about 2006.  In that time, I’ve tried on the idea of writing a straight biography of Bradlaugh, but Londoner Bryan Niblett recently wrote a very good account of Bradlaugh’s adult years (especially the Parliamentary struggle), called Dare to Stand Alone.  I was thinking of writing the story of Bradlaugh’s youth for a young adult audience.  Bradlaugh was thrown out onto the streets of East London by his parents at age 16 for declaring himself an atheist.  He participated in Chartist riots and got clubbed over the head by the police.  He joined the army and was shipped to Ireland where he had to evict starving peasants from their homes during the famine.  The story of Bradlaugh’s youth is like a set of instructions on “how to make a radical.”

And he lived in very interesting times.  Bradlaugh met everyone!  And this is the part that makes him so attractive as a subject for fiction.  In a biography, I could observe that young Charles and Charles Dickens were at the same Reform demonstration in 1868.  In a novel, I could give them dialog!  Same with many important historical characters: John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, William Gladstone, Karl Marx, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Giuseppe Mazzini, Charles Sumner, Ralph Waldo Emerson—Bradlaugh actually knew all these people!  Rather than simply telling why Marx and Bradlaugh couldn’t stand each other, it might be much more fun to show it.

It’s no secret that historical novels are widely popular, and I think it’s because most people prefer to be shown than told.  What I lose in authenticity, I can make up in immediacy.  Good historical fiction is based on lots of real research, and seems to try to maintain the reader’s interest by being plausible.  The characters have to stay “in character,” or else it’s just anachronistic fiction using some names from history.  The ultimate model of this kind of writing, for me, is Neal Stephenson’s Baroque series beginning with the novel Quicksilver, which I’ve just been rereading.  Although some elements of the story are completely fantastic, the characters generally behave as you’d expect them to (if you had studied them to the degree Stephenson did), and they always show up on cue at the times and places recorded in real history—although often with slightly different motivations and mental states than they really had at the time.

Freedom to speculate about the interior lives of the characters is one of the attractions of fiction, for the writer.  The other big attraction is the ability to "fill in the blanks," and tell the story as you believe, but can't quite prove, it must have happened.  Several people who read An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy said they’d wished there would have been more about Charles Knowlton’s wife, Tabitha.  Problem was, there was no data I could use to expand her role.  I suppose I could have said more about women’s work, and drawn some type of outline of a typical 19th-century wife, but that wasn’t what people were asking for.  They wanted to know how much Tabitha was a catalyst for Knowlton’s thinking, and how she felt about her husband being hounded and imprisoned for his ideas.  I had nothing to hang my hat on, in a biography.  In a novel, I could have told the story as I’m almost certain it happened—but not certain enough to call it history.

So in any case, I’m outlining Bradlaugh’s story as a novel, and planning on including fictional (but plausible and “in-character”) dialog with the many important real people he meets.  I’ll also introduce a few completely fictional characters who will exemplify the world in which Bradlaugh lived.  The point, I think, is to give readers a way to understand the time, place, and story, without reading the background I’ll have to read to produce it.  A way to touch these people and understand something about their lives, times, and legacy without reading thousand-page biographies of each.  Readership numbers suggest historical fiction is one of the main ways many people gain an understanding of history.  And, if done well, it can be based on the same type of information (mostly, authoritative secondary source material) that goes into (much less popular/readable) textbooks.  This is suggested in Stephenson’s Acknowledgements at the beginning of Quicksilver, where he says, "Particular mention must go to Fernand Braudel, to whose work this book may be considered a discursive footnote.  Many other scholarly works were consulted…Of particular note is Sir Winston Spencer Churchill’s six-volume biography of Marlborough, which people who are really interested in this period of history should read, and people who think that I am too long-winded should weigh."  It was Stephenson’s series, incidentally, that got me started studying history and drove me to grad school.  So, big circle completed, I guess—except, of course, I’ve still got to finish that dissertation!

The contemporary relevance of the story is a bigger concern—certainly a more explicit

Richard Carlile

concern—for historical fiction than for academic or textbook history.  Luckily, some themes seem to be universal.  For example, if part of the point of a story about a nineteenth-century freethinker is to explore radicalism and allow readers to think about the one percent and the occupiers, consider the following passage written in 1819 by Richard Carlile (whose family young Charles Bradlaugh lived with, after being disowned by his own):
It wouldn’t take much to render these words in a way that would “work” for popular audiences, and they might like to hear the story of an agitator who, although he was jailed for six years for sedition and blasphemy after writing the words above, understood that the new technology of cheap printing would make him invincible.  “As this kind of business,” he wrote from the Dorchester Gaol, “depends on the periodical publications, we can begin anywhere with half an hour’s preparation, and laugh at the Vice society, and all the influence they can use against it.  If one web be destroyed, a few hours’ work will spin another stronger and better than before”  (from Edward Royle’s anthology, The Infidel Tradition from Paine to Bradlaugh, 1974).  I like to imagine a guy like Carlile living in the age of the internet and twitter.  I also like to think today’s agitators and radicals could gain some ideas and inspiration, knowing these stories.

From Puck magazine, 1912.

Benjamin Railton

In the final stages of my work on The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us About America (Palgrave Pivot, June 21, 2013) I found myself struggling with a challenge that I believe faces all of us who seek to produce works of public scholarship. Much of the history on which my book focuses is well known to academic historians, but is (to my mind) almost entirely unknown (if not indeed often misrepresented) within the broader American community.

For example, the first of the three main “lessons” I seek to draw from the Chinese Exclusion Act has to do with the history of legal and illegal immigration, and more exactly with the commonplace phrase “My ancestors came here legally.” Academic historians are likely to know that there were no national immigration laws prior to the 1882 Exclusion Act (or at least its immediate predecessors/starting points such as the Page Act), that prior to 1921 there remained no laws that affected any immigrants not arriving from China or related Asian nations, and that between 1921 and 1965 the quota laws were directly based on ethnic/national discrimination. Yet most Americans have no sense of that history.

So how do we public scholars bridge that gap? How do we produce work that can speak both to academics and general readers? For me, the answer lies, at least in part, in a two-pronged approach: in my Introduction I explicitly address these questions for fellow academics, arguing that we scholars need to do more to bring our shared knowledge to broader public audiences; and then my three main chapters represent case studies in that approach, that is, efforts to write about subjects currently of interest to academic historians in such a way that will also enlighten a broader audience.

As I take the next steps with the project, seeking spaces and conversations where I can share its ideas, I continue to consider these questions, and to work on finding a voice and approach that can speak to different communities. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject and, of course, on the book!

Ben Railton is associate professor of English and coordinator of American Studies at Fitchburg State University. He is the author of Redefining American Identity: From Cabeza de Vaca to Barack Obama (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876-1893 (University of Alabama Press, 2007). He maintains the daily AmericanStudies blog (http://americanstudier.blogspot.com).

Randall Stephens

For about the last five years the historian Alex von Tunzelmann has composed short pieces at the Guardian on history films.  "Reel History," so reads the description, focuses on "classics of big screen history and prises fact from fiction." Does the plot square with historical realities?  What about the acting? The costumes? Do anachronisms abound? 

Here's a bit from her recent piece on Northwest Passage (1940). Writes Tunzelmann:

"Reel History" is definitely worth checking out. See more reviews here.