Great post JD. Both you and Eric have shared some excellent insights. One subject that I believe is key to being a writer (in any genre) is perseverance. It took me years of writing for free before I was able to become a professional at it. My path was a step-by-step process: newsletters led to websites, websites led to newspapers, newspapers led to magazines, and magazines led to books. Now I do all four, but all of them are tied together as my foundation. Also, don’t be afraid to get out there are speak. (You and Eric know that one for sure.) I used to have a fear of public speaking, now I’m booked up every month until Nov. and I love it. What a privilege it is to share our interests and expertise’s with others. We get the opportunity to meet all kinds of wonderful people (who often by our books) and word of mouth (ours and theirs) is the best marketing tool of all. Once I started doing lectures, I was hooked and as I do more, I get better at it. I look at our work as a product that the public needs to know about in order to enjoy it. Of course it’s not all about the money. None of us would do this it if it was, but the more books that are sold, the more articles published, the more signings and speaking engagements that are booked – the more stories of our nation’s history are shared. I have learned more about the Union cavalry, through your work and Eric’s, than any other outlet and if not for your’s (and his) perseverance, it may have never come to light.

The funny thing is a year and a half ago the Civil War was not a part of history that I was interested in. My son actually turned me on to it. My wife and I actually used Eric’s fine book “Plenty of blame to go around” as a discussion center piece and asked lot’s of questions and read more books and visited many sites. Out of that came an understanding of why the Civil War happened, economics of the time and the politics of that era but it was exciting for him and lead to many other discussions. BTW my son is only 10!

Tom

I have to admit the quality of most history professors/teachers in my experience has been poor. It was always my favorite subject and I wanted to learn but most teachers seemed to sleepwalk. Thru High School and College there have only been two teachers that stood out. Most kids I know loathe history and find it boring. My wife and I home school our son and we make sure that history is exciting to him!

Tom

I find Faust’s choice of topics “uninteresting.” But maybe it’s just me.

Nice series!

Mike

You’re right, I didn’t mean to say that Faust’s book was “dry and uninteresting”. This would not be entirely accurate, and I apologize for any confusion I’ve caused on this point. To be more precise I should have written that while her book is not as dry and uninteresting as most it is however, for the most part, unfortunate and mistaken.

Regards,
Dan

In regards to academics who write history books, I think you’ll find a wide range from the dense, plodding, and unreadable, to some of the most lively, readable, a thought-provoking works available. I don’t agree at all with the comments that Drew Faust’s recent work is “dry and uninteresting.”

This is something that is on my mind alot and I think is a serious problem in American academia and that is the poor quality of much of history teaching and writing in both high school and university. I think one of the main problems that underlie this ongoing horror is that academics are required to get a Masters in “Education” rather than in their core subject before they can teach. This is my understanding of it, and if I am mistaken, I’d like to know the truth.

Sol Stein makes an excellent point about a related matter in his book “On Writing”. Academics write for themselves and their colleagues. They don’t seem to care about their audience outside of academia which makes their writing dry and uninteresting. The dryness of academic history is one reason in my opinion why students turn away from history. A good illustration is Faust’s book on Civil War death called “This Republic of Suffering”. I think academics who make very interesting and fascinating subjects like the Civil War boring and dry ought to be held accountable in some way! It’s inconceivable to me that students should be made to loath our exciting and complicated and extremely important history because academics don’t teach it or write it well.

Good writing should affect the reader in some way, educate him/her while at the same time create an emotional response. Academic historians do not have this approach and rarely succeed when they do. When I studied history in university I was horrified at how boring the professors were, how dry the reading material was, and how much “social science” and political “correctness” hooey was clouding the most simple matters of historical study. Creative writing should be de rigeur for all academic historians. The fact that it isn’t a core aspect of a history degree seems totally bizarre to me since everything is communicated via the written word.

But I digress, again.

Thanks, Eric for a great series.

Daniel