About me
I am an a la carte scholar.
Entering this profession required me to go on a great adventure that took me to Illinois, Virginia, Wyoming, New York, West Virginia, Rhode Island, and Arkansas. I earned bachelor’s degrees in history and rhetoric and master’s degrees in journalism and history. I worked outdoors for landscaping companies and for a landowner looking to make his woods more suitable for deer hunting. I taught swim lessons, reading skills, journalism, and history. I composed fundraising letters and radio scripts for a nonprofit and wrote news stories and feature articles – and even did a little photography and proofreading – for a small-town newspaper.
These experiences helped me grow as a writer and teacher, enhanced my imagination, and got me interested in the history of the American West, inspiring me to pursue earning a PhD in history. I immensely enjoyed several types of work that I did while earning the degree and in the years just after: researching and writing my dissertation, serving as assistant editor for the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, and teaching an array of courses, including surveys on United States history and ancient and medieval world history, an upper-level course on the history of the American West, and even a course on how to succeed as a college student.
But after all that work, I eventually decided that I did not want a career in academia. Instead of taking up the wide array of tasks that would come with being an academic, I decided to focus on using just a few historians’ skills that I most enjoyed: editing, teaching, researching, and writing. In other words, I became an a la carte scholar.
Today, one of my scholarly enterprises is copy editing. I specialize in working for historians and memoirists.
I am also working on several writing projects, one of which is revising my book manuscript, titled “The War on Winter: Settling the Northern West at the Dawn of the Modern Age.”
Learn more about my work at alacartescholar.com.
When I’m not working, I’m running, walking Buford the dog, tending the yard, attending a church function, chatting with the neighbors, playing chess with my wife, or reading to someone: my wife, the baby, or myself.
I live in southwest Virginia, where the latitude wants to give us swampy weather – but the Appalachian Mountains usually prevail, keeping summers cool and winters cold enough to arouse hopes (usually dashed) for a big snow.
About the A La Carte Scholar
This is the newsletter of an a la carte scholar. I’m trained as an academic historian, but I chose not to make my career in academia. I’m much more interested in using the skills, knowledge, and insights of an academic to benefit people who are not spending their lives inside a university.
Historians read, reflect, and write. I do the same here.
I write about books, the well-stewarded life, and the connection between the events of the past and the present. I’m also slowly writing and recording a serialized history of the United States called Author and Finisher.
Subscribe for a historian’s perspective.
