Roundtable on How NOT To Write Your Second Book: Tamara Thornton on Choosing New Topics

August 25, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in How NOT To Write Your Second Book, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: academia, academic publishing, Publishing, writing 2 Comments

We are pleased to have yet another excellent contribution to our “How NOT To Write Your Second Book” Roundtable. Tamara Plakins Thornton is professor of history at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and the author of Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1785-1860 (1989), Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (1996), and Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life (2016).

And Now for Something Completely Different

Remember this old chestnut? “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.” It applies to historians too, and you’ll probably find out which one you are when you turn to your second book project. Building on your first book, making a new contribution to that historiographical conversation? Hedgehog. Or are you drawn to a topic pretty much unrelated to your earlier work? Fox. Make no mistake. Neither is smarter, more original or creative, or produces more important scholarship. But their experiences do differ. Let me share a fox’s perspective on the risks and rewards to your scholarship, intellectual development, and professional standing if you follow your nose into brand-new territory.

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Roundtable on How NOT To Write Your Second Book: Timothy Mennel on Publishing

August 24, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in How NOT To Write Your Second Book, Publishing, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: academia, academic publishing, Publishing, second book, trade publishing, University of Chicago Press, University Presses, writing Leave a comment

Continuing our roundtable “How NOT To Write Your Second Book,” Timothy Mennel, an executive editor of University of Chicago Press, looks at how the second book differs from the first.

Tell me if this sounds familiar, either for yourself or for scholars you know: “So my plan is to complete my dissertation by next May. After that, I’ll be on the market. I’ll take whatever job I can, but my focus is going to be on getting a book contract from a university press, speeding through the peer review process, and getting the leverage I need to move to an R1. And then I can start my real work. The second book is where I’ll do what I really want to. And it will be trade. I’m tired of writing just for SHEAR.”

Now, what happens, of course, is that the dissertation takes three years to finish, the job market is worse than anyone could have imagined, the peer-review process is brutal, but the book does finally come out. And no matter what else has happened—that dream of doing what you really want to, which often is framed as writing that second book as a trade book, lives on. Continue reading →

Roundtable on How NOT To Write Your Second Book: Paul Erickson on Fellowship Applications

August 23, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in Academia, How NOT To Write Your Second Book, Publishing, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: academia, Fellowships, Publishing, writing 1 Comment

Continuing our roundtable on “How NOT To Write Your Second Book,” we are pleased to have Paul Erickson, the Program Director for The Humanities, Arts, and Culture; and American Institutions, Society, and the Public Good at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, talk about Fellowship Applications.

When I was asked to participate in a roundtable on how not to write your second book, I felt like a bit of an outlier, since my CV makes it clear that the best way to not write a second book is to never have written a first book. So instead of giving advice on how to write (or how not to write) a second book, I will share some thoughts on how to ask (or how not to ask) for fellowship support to write a second book, based on 9 years I spent as Director of Academic Programs at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. I hope that these suggestions will be useful to anybody thinking about applying for fellowships, but will be directed at Junto readers who are contemplating how (and when) to apply for fellowship support for second book projects. Continue reading →

Roundtable on How NOT To Write Your Second Book: Kathleen DuVal, “Treating Your Second Book as a Job”

August 22, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in How NOT To Write Your Second Book, Publishing, Roundtables, Special Features, Uncategorized Tags: academia, Publishing, second book, writing Leave a comment

We continue our roundtable on “How NOT To Write Your Second Book” with a post by Kathleen DuVal, Gray Distinguished Term Professor at the University of North Carolina and author of Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution.

If you are reading this, you probably have a goal for yourself that in a certain number of years from now—say ten—you won’t be saying to yourself or others, “I don’t feel any closer to finishing my second book than I was ten years ago.” But you probably also don’t want to be saying, “All I have done for most of my adult life is to try to work on a book every spare minute, or feel guilty about not working on a book.”

In hopes of keeping either of those from happening, I suggest thinking of the second book as a job. I mean that in two ways. First, (if you really do want to write a second book) researching and writing it should feel like work that is part of your job, work that you have to do. But second, this book should feel like part of your job in that your job is just part of your life, alongside the other important pieces of your particular life. Continue reading →

Roundtable on “How NOT To Write Your Second Book”: Introduction by Emily Conroy-Krutz and Jessica Lepler

August 21, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in How NOT To Write Your Second Book, Publishing, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: academia, Publishing, second book, writing 1 Comment

This week we are privileged to feature a roundtable that was organized by Emily Conroy-Krutz and Jessica Lepler and presented at SHEAR’s 2017 conference. It was such a wonderful discuss that it deserved a broader audience. We are grateful that they all agreed to share their remarks in blog-form. Today we feature Emily and Jessica’s introduction, with individual contributions posted each day between now and the weekend.

How do you start a new book that’s on a wildly different topic from your last book? Or written in a different style? And how do you write a book while teaching new preps and serving on committees? What if you’re also raising kids and caring for aging family members? If a book could be articles, should it be articles? In a packed conference room on a hot Saturday in July, five incredibly generous, funny, and thoughtful scholars shared their tips and tricks for “How Not to Write Your Second Book,” and the laughter and nods around the room suggested that the comments, questions, and conversation spoke to concerns that are widely shared among mid-career scholars and that had sparked the creation of the SHEAR Second-Book Writers’ Workshop (2BWW). Continue reading →

Q&A with Carla Pestana on The English Conquest of Jamaica

August 16, 2017 By Benjamin Park in Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A, Special Features Tags: 17th Century, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, British Empire, Carla Gardina Pestana, imperial history, Jamaica, Oliver Cromwell Leave a comment

To accompany the review by Casey Schmitt that was published yesterday, we are pleased to have this Question & Answer with Carla Pestana today regarding her new book, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Harvard University Press, 2017). We thank Dr. Pestana for her time. Continue reading →

Book Review: Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica

August 15, 2017 By Casey Schmitt in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: 17th Century, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, British Empire, Caribbean, Cromwell's Western Design, England, imperial history, Jamaica, Oliver Cromwell 1 Comment

**Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).**

Pestana Review

It is an exciting time to be a scholar of Caribbean history. From conferences to publications, the past decade has seen historians of early America, Latin America, and the Atlantic world turn to the Caribbean for insights into the development of empire, slavery, race, and commerce.[1] In this resurgence of Caribbean historiography, the seventeenth century has emerged as a pivotal period. That said, by taking a relatively well-known event like the Western Design, UCLA Professor and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America and the World, Carla Gardina Pestana, demonstrates the value of exploring the early Caribbean in her new book The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire. Pestana’s work aptly shows the profound intellectual pay-off for historians willing to explore the seventeenth-century Caribbean with bigger questions about imperialism, race, religion, and gender. Continue reading →

Roundtable: Democratize the Classroom!

August 10, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in Pedagogy, Roundtables, Special Features, Teaching Amid Political Tension Tags: pedagogy, students, survey course, syllabi, teaching 3 Comments

This is the final post in our series on Teaching Amid Political Tension (read Part I, Part II, Part III). Today’s post is by Sean Trainor, who teaches history, writing, and professional communication at the University of Florida. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, TIME, Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Junto, Early American Studies, and elsewhere. He co-hosts the weekly podcast Impolitic.

To be perfectly honest, the current age of turmoil has had a minimal impact on the content of my courses. Long before Donald Trump emerged as a presidential contender or Pepe the Frog became an absurd, menacing presence in Americans’ collective consciousness, I had been teaching a politically engaged curriculum that focused on the intersection of racism, sexism, inequality, imperialism, and jingoistic excess in American history. I had designed these courses as a kind of rebuttal to what I saw as the defining sins of American life, and insofar as Donald Trump gleefully embodies these sins, my courses have aged well in the era of his presidency.

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Roundtable: Historical Memory and Contemporary Politics

August 9, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in Pedagogy, Roundtables, Special Features, Teaching Amid Political Tension Tags: historical memory, pedagogy, students, teaching 4 Comments

This is the third post in our series on Teaching Amid Political Tension (read Part I, Part II). Today’s post comes from Jennifer M. Black, an Assistant Professor of History and Government at Misericordia University in Dallas, PA, and Network Editor-in-Chief at H-Material Culture. She tweets at @blackjen1.

When asked to contribute to this roundtable, my mind immediately turned to a 100-level course I taught this past spring, “Turning Points in American History.” Though the course had been designed as a “greatest hits” of the US history survey, I decided that I wanted to interrogate the concept of memory as it relates to the Revolution, the Civil War, and more centrally, the shifting understandings of Freedom and Rights in the US. I intentionally chose materials that would trace these changing ideas over time and highlight the legacy of the Revolution in the Civil War, the 1960s, and our own moment today. Ultimately, I wanted to get my students to talk about the 2015 controversy that arose around the Confederate flag after Dylann Roof entered the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, SC and brutally murdered parishioners as they prayed. This, I hoped, would push them to consider the continued relevance of these moments—of history—for today. In forcing them to confront the ways the past still shapes our society and culture, I hoped they would be motivated to work towards a better future.

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Roundtable: Teaching History in the Trump Era

August 8, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in Pedagogy, Roundtables, Special Features, Teaching Amid Political Tension Tags: pedagogy, students, teaching 4 Comments

This is the second post in the series on Teaching Amid Political Tension (read Part I). Today’s post is by Gautham Rao, who is an Assistant Professor of History at American University. He is on Twitter @gauthamrao.

One day in my small undergraduate historiography seminar a few years ago, one student said something really offensive to another student. I can’t really repeat the offending sentence, but it involved a racist aspersion toward a student of color and the offender invoked the name of then-candidate Trump as he spat out the shocking utterance. I remember being so shocked at what I had heard, and the condescending way in which it was said, that I shrank from the occasion. Luckily, the student at whom the comment was directed was more than capable of standing up for herself and others. No matter, I went home that day feeling like I had failed my students. The feeling did not go away for a long time.

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