Here's part of the story: I speak regularly to a variety of audiences, from beer conventions to marketing events for Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal; from the Emily Dickinson Museum to the National Business Incubators Association. I also contribute to Fox Business Network, and have written opinion pieces for the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. You can also see me in "Modern Marvels: Plumbing" (History Channel); "Ultimate Factories: Budweiser" (National Geographic Channel); and "The American Brew" (Florentine Films). I'm currently writing a history of meat in America (Carnivore Nation: Meat and the Making of Modern America, forthcoming, Harcourt). Here's the rest of the story:  I spent the late 1980s and early 1990s in graduate school, learning to be a historian. I got my Ph.D. in 1992 and began working as a professor at a university in Mobile, Alabama, in 1993. And discovered that I hated being a prof. Loved the students. Hated the committees, the departmental politics — and, most of all, hated writing for a narrow academic audience.  Why, I wondered, don't historians write for ordinary people? By my sixth year as a professor, I was fed up, to put it mildly. I worked hard at my research and writing but was disheartened to know that only a handful of other professors would ever read it.  Sure, eventually academic history works its way into textbooks for students in high school and college, but only after many years. I tried to work around that with the plumbing book, writing it and presenting the material in such a way that a college student could understand it, but I knew that aside from a few professors and undergrads, few people would read that book. So in 1999, I quit my job to write history for a general audience. First up was the Key West. The process of writing it energized me more than any work I'd done in the previous fifteen years. I knew I'd made the right choice. Today I'm even more excited about writing history for the "rest of us" - ordinary Americans who are curious about who we are as a people and a nation. I hope you enjoy reading history as much as I enjoy creating it.  Thanks for stopping by — and thanks for making books and reading part of your life.