First Person

Pinch Me: I'm a Full-Time Historian

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By James E. McWilliams

It's been a few months now and the immediate thrill has faded. Nevertheless, I still have to pinch myself. I usually do it when I roll out of bed, just after I'm hit with the realization -- a new and profound and reassuring realization: I have a job.

A real job. No longer as an adjunct, but as an assistant professor of history at a large state university with an excellent library, good students, a graduate program, office space (with a view!), a parking permit, and -- a personal dream come true -- free access to an indoor pool. So, no kidding, I really do it: I pinch my arm. And then I tell myself to get up and get to work because I happen to be the luckiest man alive, or at least this side of the Mississippi.

As I sit in my office and prepare for the fall semester, I'm reminded of a funny thing: I almost didn't accept the offer. Not because I had other offers, mind you, but because I'd become unexpectedly attached to the moonlighting work that kept my head above water as I endured the financial indignity of adjunct status. It's hard to believe that anything could have even remotely dissuaded me from a job that represented the Holy Grail I'd spent my 20s preparing to find. But sure enough, when the offer arrived, when the fear of career implosion came to a screeching halt, I'd become something of an accomplished freelance writer -- accomplished enough, anyway, to consider forging ahead and writing full time.

Young historians have a knack for underestimating the flexibility of their skills. Graduate study, however, is a uniquely intensive experience that, in the course of training us to master a formal body of knowledge, incidentally cultivates talents that journalism schools could only dream of imparting. We know how to write, do research, and analyze obscure and massive amounts of information on a level that not only qualifies us to become legitimate scholars but -- should we have the inclination -- also prepares us to sell our work to popular magazines and newspapers, very often for top dollar.

I learned this remunerative lesson on a whim after spending an enchanting afternoon at a bookstore owned by Larry McMurtry in Archer City, Tex. I was so impressed with the many scholarly tomes weighing down an otherwise vacant Main Street that I punched out a 500-word blurb about my experience among the stacks and e-mailed it to an editor at -- no, not Harper's -- but an in-flight magazine. The next day she accepted the piece and asked if $500 was all right. All Right? It took me all of 45 minutes to write.

"Yeah," I said, trying to play it cool, "that'll work just fine."

But wait a second, I thought. This isn't what a real historian was supposed to do, was it? Well, over the next three years, while teaching as an adjunct, I ignored that question and wrote far and wide on a diverse range of topics. The learning curve was steep, but I realized that with thick skin (you get a lot of rejections) and persistence I could make more money by writing freelance than I could on the adjunct beat. (I know that's not saying a lot.) So instead of indulging in the incessant bitch-sessions that mar the discourse of underemployed Ph.D.'s, I put my verbal skills to more sanguine purposes and hit the freelance pavement like a hitchhiker looking for his next lift.

My stock in trade became the book review. The advantage of writing reviews for popular publications is that editors are desperate for well-written reviews of history books. There are lots of writers out there willing to tackle the new 1,000-page Churchill biography, but who can do it with competence? I made contacts at about six newspapers (daily and alternative) and started publishing three or four reviews a month. Sure, that's a load of work, but as a writer who once prepared for comp exams, it was more than manageable. Plus, these jobs guaranteed about $600 a month.

OK, not a staggering sum, but a decent start nonetheless.

Meanwhile, the in-flight piece turned into other assignments for the same magazine -- jobs in the 2,000-word range for which I was paid $1 a word. Within a year I had enough clips to send to a few posh travel magazines, along with a bunch of story ideas. One afternoon many months later I got a phone call from an editor at Travel and Leisure who had kept a file of my insistent queries. She wondered if I would write a short piece on an art exhibit in New Orleans. I agreed, and at $2 a word it was well worth it. This story also became a springboard into larger assignments for the magazine, including a 1,500-word story on an historic downtown neighborhood in Atlanta, Ga. Six or seven of these gigs a year and, well, I was still not getting rich. But hey, I was paying the rent and working from the neck up.

It didn't take long for professional historians I knew to start rolling their eyes at my foray into the journalistic fringe. My articles were something less than scholarly, often quite folksy in tone, and so consciously geared for a -- gasp! -- nonacademic audience. Shouldn't I be working on something more substantial? What was up with my dissertation?

Personally, I find this anti-anti-intellectualism absolutely intolerable. Historians not only have a knack for underestimating their own talents, but they can also be a bit self-important about the exclusive domain of their high-minded inquiry. Anyone who's labored through comprehensive exams and a dissertation knows full well that we're trained to direct our considerable skills towards highly sophisticated models and conceptually obscure questions. Which is a nice way of saying that we're trained to overthink ourselves into tiny -- dare I say, potentially irrelevant -- boxes.

Which brings me back to my new job. Accepting a position as an academic historian means it's time to negotiate with these tiny boxes. Frankly, I'm not sure how I'll do it. Nevertheless, as I embark on the academic path, I won't forget the value of my freelancing stint, a stint that I think all fresh Ph.D.'s are not only more than qualified to undertake, but one that they also should periodically attempt in order to touch base with the world beyond the ivied walls.

For me, I hope that three lessons will guide my career.

Lesson 1: Write with clarity. It often comes as a surprise to my colleagues, but editors at popular newspapers and magazines are far more critical of my prose than are their counterparts at academic journals. I've been pushed to write jargon-less and immediately understandable copy by editors who know that a popular audience sits at the other end of a story. Much of our academic work would have wider appeal if we only clarified our language. Plus, we'd sell a lot more books.

Lesson 2: Subject matter is important. A historian will spend the course of his entire professional career exploring the minute details of a single, small topic. Even switching subfields is considered a kind of eccentricity limited to the profession's free spirits, and generally something attempted only after tenure. While such slavish dedication to a lone cause has its scholarly merits, I think it ultimately discourages creative approaches to larger historical questions. Why do we have to wait until we are emeritus to ask the big questions and offer sweeping answers?

Lesson 3: People are at the vital core of any decent story. Freelance journalism consistently brought me face to face with the daily drama of human life. How easy it is for historians, with our sophisticated models and theories and analytical categories, to overlook the obvious fact that we're dealing with something as basic as human interaction. As a graduate student, before I began writing freelance, I wrote an academic article on a 17th-century artisan named Joshua Buffum. I now realize that I never once thought about how he looked, or what his voice sounded like, or what kind of clothes he wore, or how he smelled, or the expressions he made. Now I'm in awe at my lack of curiosity.

At the moment, though, I'm feeling the full weight of the new semester and those high-minded lessons are nothing but words on the page. Students wanting me to sign add slips have been knocking on my door all morning. Twice in the last 10 minutes, people have interrupted me with telephone calls, once to admonish me for missing a meeting and again to remind me about another one this afternoon. My syllabus isn't quite done yet but a student has just e-mailed me for a copy of it. The computer in my office is possessed by demons, and I cannot for the life of me get a story idea about Texas home schooling out of my head. Most ominously of all, there's a stream of ants marching up my window sill and I have no idea whom to call about it.

For the moment, at least, I don't feel like the luckiest man this side of the Mississippi, and certainly not in the world. Instead, I feel like I'm about to embark on a mission that, like these damned ants, will have me marching in lockstep towards a larger mission of which I am not quite certain.

I'll continue to pinch myself, though, and never forget that the pool opens at noon.