How I Became a Writer

A reflection on the Golden Age of blogging, and how the internet took me someplace that my university training could not

A version of this essay appeared in The American Historian in 2015: I wanted to revive, and rewrite it to honor the origins of the Substack platform in the commercial blogging platforms that became available in the early twentieth century. But given the controversies about a career panel at the American Historical Association meeting in New Orleans last…