Editor’s note: This is the eighth entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Chris Deutsch (@dr_cdeutsch) is a historian of agriculture and the environment in the History Department at the University of Missouri. Here’s how he does history.
What’s your current position? How long have you worked there and is this your first connection with the organization?
My current position is teaching postdoc in the History Department at the University of Missouri. This is my third year working for the History Department.
Tell our readers what a typical day of work is like for you. Is there such a thing as a typical day for you?
My work day, unsurprisingly, depends on whether or not I am teaching. If I am teaching, my schedule is largely dependent on my class schedule. On teaching days, I usually get started before 9 AM, putting the finishing touches on that day’s materials and memorizing that day’s lectures. I have been fortunate to have office space at the university so my prep takes place near my classroom. I intermittently prep, grade, and teach as needed throughout most of these days. If I can carve out reading time, I like to when I have a heavy teaching day to keep my mind fresh and engaged. Depending on my projects, I write at the end of the day if I did not do so earlier in the day.
If it is a non-teaching day, my day is less structured. I use my office as much as possible and write there. Occasionally, I’ll find a coffee shop or outdoor place to curl up with my laptop to write. Since I live apart from my spouse for this job, I spend three or more months of my year in California where I get as much work done as possible while trying to make up for lost time.
The COVID-19 pandemic has absolutely shaken my work schedule unfortunately. I am getting done what I can but it is a struggle given the state of the world. I am never good at sharing this sort of struggle but I find it hard to concentrate now though I have been able to get some shorter works published.1
Was there ever a moment where you knew you wanted to study history?
Ah, the origin story! The singular moment when teaching history became my career goal was when I was reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and I fell in love with the idea of sharing people’s stories. I was not in school at the time but I enrolled a few years later. At school, I first was preparing to be a secondary school teacher with a history emphasis but shifted to a regular history degree when I decided to apply to graduate school.
Chris as a sergeant circa 2002.
You’re a veteran. Is there any connection between your service and your academic career? Did it prepare you in any way for studying history?
I served from 1998 to 2002 in the 82nd Airborne Division as a combat engineer. The connections are subtle yet significant. First off was a lack of intellectual engagement. I mean, I certainly studied Field Manuals and Technical Manuals but nothing quite matched the joy I felt when reading Zinn’s work. Then there was getting to know the world and all sorts of people during my service. I met people from diverse backgrounds, which sparked my interest in peoples and places that I otherwise had no knowledge of. Finally, there was the discipline and focus that are crucial to studying the past.
Where did you go to college and graduate school? Was history your main area of study?
I earned my BA and MA degrees from California State University, Sacramento (better known by its nickname SacState). I earned my PhD at the University of Missouri. All of these degrees are history degrees with my PhD including a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies.
Like many historians, Chris’ work took him to National Archives-II in College Park, Maryland.
What, so far, is your largest research project?
My largest project has so far been my dissertation. I wrote about something I called “beef policy,” a concept I defined as a deliberate if unstated federal policy of ensuring mass beef production and consumption from 1945 to 1974. My main research focus were presidential administrations, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and women protestors who all fought it out over how much beef Americans would eat. It was a successful policy, with per capita beef consumption peaking in 1974, and helped to ensure that the baby boom years were years associated with affluence and plenty because of all the beef.
My work challenges the notion that Americans after WWII slid into complacency and conservatism by exploring the fundamental truth at the heart of those thirty years: food was not a guarantee. Food was an object of obsession and most Americans understood that their nation’s affluence was fragile. Not only did 20 to 30 percent of Americans live in poverty as measured by access to food but the food on the table was not taken for granted. Hence, thirty years of presidential obsessions with beef prices and availability.
My study’s final point documented the importance of international history to my project. It was there from the get-go. Reconversion after WWII revolved around sending enough stuff (including limited amounts of beef) to Europe to secure the peace but not so much that it would spark domestic upheaval. Similarly, from 1947 to 1954, the United States and Mexico ran an extensive and intensive foot-and-mouth disease eradication program in Mexico, which the United States paid for in order to prevent the disease from heading north and destroying the feedlot industry. There are other important global issues like beef imports and eradicating other diseases. I discovered beef policy touched on a wide range of issues, foreign and domestic.
On a rainy day, outside the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received about conducting research?
The best advice I have received about conducting research is to establish a system as early as possible. Decide how you are going to take notes, catalogue photos, track sources, and keep everything accurate before heading out to research. Even if your sources come primarily from a book you can use digitally or through a library, you need to keep it all properly annotated and tracked. The second piece of advice was to write an archives journal each night after researching. This helped me to process my work each day and aided me in envisioning my project.
Chris heading into research at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri.
How would you describe your writing process?
I would describe it as intermittently structured or frantic for stretches of time. In deep writing mode, I usually need to begin by reading intellectually satisfying short pieces to get my mind going before tackling my own paragraphs. I’ll spend ten or more hours writing on those days. If I am doing other stuff, I think about my work until I have time, then I’ll write down my words. Too often, though, I run out the deadline, waiting to have a better understanding of my words. Ironically, writing is its own best inspiration so I try to avoid frantic writing.
Earlier this year, you announced you will be writing a book, Beeftopia: The Red Meat Politics of Prosperity in Postwar America (tentative title). Tell us about the book and why we should read it.
Why should you read Beeftopia? Simply this: because meat is interesting! When’s the last time you or someone you know felt that gratified sensation meat provides? I’d guess relatively recently for most readers. My book (release date is unofficially 2022) explains how Americans turned that feeling into political and policy crusades for beef and fought against a meat industry that also ran its own crusade for beef.2 My book will be the first explanation for how Americans turned their desire for beef into a reality, a reality created by decades of fighting between two factions over the shape of the American economy and the democratic nature of the United States from the 1930s to the 1980s.
“The Francis Quadrangle, columns and main building, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri,” Carol M. Highsmith, 2009. Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress.
You’ve been at the University of Missouri for much of the past decade – as a PhD student, a Visiting Professor, and now a Teaching Post-Doc – what do you enjoy most about the university? What do you think of living in Columbia, Missouri?
What I enjoy most about the university are the students. Teaching at a large state school poses a set of challenges because of the size of the school and the diversity of the student body. My classes are filled with students who have different needs and it is tough to design courses to handle that diversity. It is exactly the kind of challenge I love, though.
Columbia, MO is fun. It is unlike the New Jersey I grew up in or the California of my teenage years and early adulthood. Nevertheless, a lot goes on in the city like the True/False film festival and plenty of blues gatherings.3
Your work engages with several fields, especially agricultural history and environmental studies. Tell our readers a little about these two areas of study and which topics within them your scholarship is in discussion with.
Agricultural history is a field I did not expect to study. I was in no way planning on studying it but I am glad that I do. I think agricultural studies is a vibrant field that may no longer be a pillar of academic history as it once was but it is a field more vibrant than I initially expected. My work, therefore, touches on agricultural history in many ways. The most prominent is agricultural and farm policy, an old yet important element of agricultural history. This also touches on American political development and other related ways to study governmentality in the rural areas of the country. It requires addressing important and difficult questions about power and democracy, about policymaking and the state. Agriculture is where the US federal government was at its most powerful so studying something like cattle and beef allows for a clearer vision of how the federal government could act if it had the power to do so.
My engagement with environmental history is no less important. I am in discussion with the historic and changing effects of human activity on the land and how ecological processes constantly shape and contour human history. My very topic, meat, concerns humans trying to satiate a biological urge to eat and the need not to starve. In the past several decades, environmental historians have positioned bodies, human and animal, as environments in and of themselves as well as linking bodies to their surrounding environments. My work does this as well by tracing links between what cattle endured and what that did to the meat that people ate or discarded.
What courses will you be teaching this fall? How are you preparing for the upcoming semester?
I am teaching two online courses. One is the freshman survey 1865 to present and the other is 1945 to present. The introductory course is an experimental class that will teach US history in a global context. To accomplish this, a different guest lecturer will teach once each week and I’ll teach the other lecture and manage the course. The 1945 to present is an eight-week online course and will be similar to a sixteen-week version I have already taught.
I am preparing for the semester by completely rewriting my course materials and designing online courses from scratch.
Teaching in the COVID-19 era means masking up.
Were you teaching last spring (and what were you teaching) when COVID-19 hit the U.S.? For you, what have been the biggest challenges to teaching and advising students in the coronavirus era?
I was teaching two courses last semester. It was brutal. The biggest challenge is to keep focused on the course and on staying connected. With courses shifting the weight of instruction to an online format, the risk of students washing out or losing connection is high, especially for incoming students who are particularly vulnerable when transitioning to a new environment. In addition, not every student has reliable access to the internet or a device that they can securely use for course work.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
Ha, where to start!? The biggest misconception is that historians only track the dates and objectively let the story tell itself. Essentially, that historians are chroniclers and not scholarly or academic storytellers. What historians really do is decide what is historically significant, but no one listens unless we tell a good story, so we try to tell good stories.
If money, time, and distance were not issues, what’s a dream project you’d love to tackle? Or what’s a class you have always wanted to teach, but just haven’t had the opportunity to?
A dream project would be one of three choices but all also depend on destroyed documents. The first would be to write a full history of the California State un-American affairs committee, whose collection at the California State Archives is about 10 percent what it was in 1971. The second would be a history of J. Edger Hoover and the FBI using his secret files. The third would be a history of the meat industry from the perspective of the companies. Again, these records were destroyed so they will never be told. A close fourth is a history of punk and hardcore music that focused on social movements and the business infrastructure of the industry.
My dream course would either be a 1990s course or a course on punk.
If you weren’t a scholar, what kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
Likely, some form of teaching, maybe policy analysis, or possibly generic white collar work.
- If you haven’t already, check out Chris’ Contingent essay about meat and the regulation of wet markets.
- The meat industry, led by its chief lobbying group the American Meat Institute, sought to reduce the role of the federal meat inspection system and to limit policymakers and lawmakers from adding regulations or conducting public investigations into the industry’s business practices.
- True/False is an annual film festival held in Columbia, around late winter/early spring, dedicated to documentaries. Screenings are held at multiple locations, all over town, and the event continues to grow in documentary submissions and festival visitors since its 2004 debut