When I decided to leave academia in the summer of 1999 and abandon the world of “publish or perish”, I lost interest in doing historical research. All of my attention was directed to teaching. That did not, however, reduce my passion for history. Indeed, teaching World Cultures opened up a whole world of new things to learn about. And I found myself digging into topics in United States history that I never would have explored as a college professor. No time for that in a world of publish or perish! So teaching high school gave me a much freer opportunity to explore my passion for learning new things, to go wherever my mind wandered. More often than not, a lot of my discoveries would end up in my teaching in one way of another.
Then around 2008 a got the bug to write a book. Not to start up trying to get my dissertation published again or work on a book on dueling. A few years after leaving the university world, I tossed all my university files in the garbage, never thinking I’d ever want to go back to them again. (I did, however, save everything I’d typed up from notes to published papers on floppy disks that are now safely ensconced on my hard drive.)
No, the topic was unlike anything I had ever thought about as an early American historian. It was red ochre.
I don’t think I had ever heard of red ochre until I started preparing to teach at Country Day in the summer of 2002.
But I came across references to red ochre a few times that summer in going online to find material for teaching both my World Cultures and United States history classes and I was hooked.
What was it about red ochre that made it such a universal phenomenon, across space and time, from prehistory to the present?
Thereafter, for the next six years or so, I started collecting any reference I found to red ochre. And then around 2008 I decided, what the heck, I would start working on a book about red ochre. I was thinking along the lines of a Borders or Barnes & Noble book that would catch your eye. I also had these ideas about including a small packet of red ochre with each book but I didn’t know how that could be done.
Anyway I started seriously pursuing red ochre research and, after working off and on for about two years, I had about six chapters worth of material when I started pursuing the role of red ochre in the Scientific Revolution. Basically this was the story of the role the ferric oxide (i.e., red ochre) played in the development of chemistry and medicine in the 17th and 18th centuries. But as I started digging deeper and deeper into just this topic, I realized that I had dug myself such a deep hole that I essentially had another book, a book that deal much more with the history of chemistry and medicine from the classical world of the Greeks and Romans through the 19th century.
At that point I had two choices. I could either dump the chapter on red ochre and the Scientific Revolution (which objectively I really didn’t need to have) or pursue the next shiny object. And guess what? I chose the next shiny object!
However, a book on red ochre is still a great idea. Of all my book projects – my wife Jennifer calls them my “hobbies” – her favorite is the red ochre book. She gets tired of the other book projects very easily but always liked hearing what I had discovered about red ochre. The book would definitely have the biggest audience of any book I’ve worked on and, I think, still be an important book.
All the boxes are up in the attic. All I have to do is get them down and start working on them!