Editor’s note: This is the seventeenth 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.
Raechel Lutz (@raechellutz on Twitter) is an environmental historian and teacher at the Wardlaw + Hartridge School in Edison, New Jersey. Here’s how she does history.
What’s your current position?
I currently work as a history and humanities teacher at the Wardlaw + Hartridge School—an independent K–12 school in Edison, New Jersey. I was hired in the summer of 2020 and started my second year there this fall. I wasn’t familiar with the school before signing on but am happy to be working there. It is a great organization that is genuine in its care for students and teachers.
Tell our readers what the work day/work week is like for you.
During the school year, my week can get a bit hectic. Many independent schools have rotating schedules determining which classes meet when. I’m fortunate that at my school the schedule is pretty simple—a five-day rotating schedule (where Mondays are always Mondays). I see each of my classes four times per week for forty minutes and one day for an eighty-minute double period. Since I have been at different schools for the past few years, I use most of my prep periods to create lesson plans for new courses and do the day-to-day work of teaching. I often describe teaching as making a thousand little decisions every day.
Even though I can count on a typical weekly schedule, I have to be prepared for unexpected changes. Students at my school are involved in lots of different activities, sports, service organizations, and affinity groups and have legitimate reasons to miss class frequently. I often have to change my lesson schedule based on school events. I also serve as an advisor to a class of about ten freshmen, which is not uncommon for faculty at independent schools. I usually meet with the group once a week, in addition to other occasional duties.
In terms of teaching, I have a lot of freedom to shape the curricula of my classes, as long as they are appropriate within the history department’s goals. For example, in my senior environmental history class, I built the entire curriculum (relying on Emily Waklid and Michelle K. Berry’s A Primer for Teaching Environmental History) primarily as a seminar-style reading and writing course, but then decided to modify it to be more project-based. Now students learn about environmental history by creating podcasts, doing research, and completing different student-centered learning activities.
As my own career progresses, I’m hoping to fit in more time during the week for writing/editing/revising work. Right now, I sneak time here and there to do the editing and organizational work that my projects need. I’m currently in the planning stages for three book projects so I don’t have much active writing or research to do right now, but that will change.
I do most of my writing and research during the summers and between jobs. While I was unemployed during the summer and fall of 2019, I was able to (mostly) complete revisions on my manuscript project, The Good Polluter. I’m hoping that next summer I can complete any revisions required by the anonymous reviewers (the book is currently under peer review), and work on the introduction for a collection I am editing, New Jersey’s Natures.
Regardless of whether I am in school or not, I try to stick to an 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. workday. I don’t write or edit after dinner, and only choose to work during the early weekend hours if it is a necessity. I began keeping these hours during graduate school to give myself some boundaries, and I’ve been pretty consistent maintaining them. But I am also regularly reading nonfiction books for work, research, or personal interest. Right now, I’m reading Gordon Chang’s Ghosts of Gold Mountain. It’s really interesting.
What is your earliest memory of a historical event?
I vividly remember 9/11. I was in history class during my junior year of high school when my teacher abruptly got a phone call in the middle of our lesson. It was early in the year and we were still reviewing stuff from the first half of the US survey, which I had taken the year before. He immediately turned on the TV (yes, we had a small TV mounted in the upper corner of the classroom), and when we asked what happened we were told just to watch. We stayed in class all morning and eventually parents began pulling their kids out of school. I grew up in northern New Jersey, in a commuter town, and many of my classmates’ parents worked in New York. It was scary.
When I teach about 9/11, I tell students about my experience, when I was the same age they are now. Together, we watch a compilation of the day’s newsreels and although none of them are old enough to have experienced that moment, I try to give them a sense of what living through history was like.
Raechel at her 2007 college graduation from Ithaca College, with Professor Michael Smith.
Tell us about your undergraduate and graduate school experiences. Was history your main area of study? Did you complete an MA and PhD?
When I started at Ithaca College, I declared my major in history and threw myself into my coursework. Professor Michael Smith introduced me to environmental history, and I took as many classes with him as I could. Since I completed my major requirements pretty quickly, I decided to double major in art history. I loved going to art museums and didn’t want to waste my credits taking a bunch of different introductory classes. Getting a C in Introduction to Philosophy helped me make that decision too!
After I graduated, I felt a lot of pressure to start working, but doing what? I had no idea. I found a job tutoring students but was unhappy with the strict corporate culture at the tutoring center. I later got a position at a local art museum right as the economy began to tank in the spring of 2008. I worked there for a few years, first as the assistant to the museum director and then in marketing. I thought it would be my dream job, but I always felt that it wasn’t enough for me. I got bored. So I decided to get my master’s in history at Rutgers-Newark, which was only thirty minutes from work. Eventually, I applied to history PhD programs too. I didn’t dream of becoming a professor; I just wanted to keep learning.
I attended Rutgers-New Brunswick and graduated with my doctorate in 2018. I was a diligent grad student, presenting papers and organizing panels at domestic and international conferences, writing book reviews, and trying to do all the right things. Still, in all my time on the job market (the seasons of 2017 and 2019) I never once got an interview for a tenure-track job. The academic job market was—and is—horrible. Just before I defended my dissertation, I found out that a private high school near my home was hiring. I got the job and haven’t really looked back.
My goal is to teach students the different kinds of history that historians are doing, and to model how to turn their intellectual interests into a career. I also hope to continue writing, publishing, and developing my voice as a public-facing historian.
Raechel at her 2018 PhD graduation ceremony from Rutgers-New Brunswick.
Tell us about your book manuscript, The Good Polluter.
At my dissertation defense, my committee, especially one of my advisors, Neil Maher, urged me to make sure that my book went to press, and I’ve been committed to doing that. I never imagined being an author, but now I’m proud to say that the book is under peer review, and I’m hoping it will be published within the next year or two.
The Good Polluter examines the environmental history of Standard Oil’s two New Jersey refineries from the 1870s to the present. In this project, I analyze the centrality of refineries to our contemporary fossil fuel energy system. I also investigate the corporate media messaging that has worked to make oil appealing to consumers. It is a revision of my dissertation but has new chapters and is more strongly theorized and argued.
Tell us about the two edited collections you are working on: American Energy Cinema and New Jersey’s Natures.
One developed out of a panel I organized for the 2018 American Society for Environmental History’s annual meeting in Riverside, California. I got to talking with Robert Lifset and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre, who also participated on the panel, and we thought a book about Hollywood’s depiction of energy and energy industries would be interesting and fun to write. The three of us are now editing the book and I think it is going to be historiographically fascinating and useful to lots of different kinds of readers and scholars. Look for American Energy Cinema from the University of West Virginia Press sometime at the end of 2022 or early 2023.
New Jersey’s Natures is a book I’ve been dreaming about putting together for a while. It is a collection of essays on New Jersey’s environmental history written mostly by historians. My grad school advisor Neil Maher edited a book on this topic in 2006, and I consider this one to be sort of round two. The field is more robust than it was fifteen years ago; I have sixteen additional authors (so far) working on topics from the Delaware Bay to the Jersey Shore, covering histories spanning from the precolonial era to present day. The book is in the planning stages, and several of the authors involved have applied to present drafts of their research at next year’s American Society for Environmental History conference. I’m going to reach out to prospective presses soon.
The Good Polluter and New Jersey’s Natures are special to me, not just because I’m leading those projects, but also because one of my goals as a scholar is to focus my work on my beloved home state. I have purposefully shaped my career to be a New Jersey historian. New Jersey’s environmental history has a lot to offer students and readers, and I’m trying to help circulate that knowledge.
Some of the books that have informed Raechel’s work. You also should know Raechel is an avid collector of agate bookends.
You’re an environmental historian. For those interested in the field and wanting to learn more about it, what are some environmental history works that have informed your work? Who are some environmental historians that have inspired you?
Environmental history is a big field and lots of scholars are doing fascinating work. Nancy Langston’s Toxic Bodies inspired me while I was applying to doctoral programs. It is an incredible and frightening study of diethylstilbestrol (a synthetic form of estrogen). Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism will challenge your conceptions of scholarship, the acquisition of knowledge, and pollution itself. Melanie Kiechle’s Smell Detectives and Catherine McNeur’s Taming Manhattan are incredible studies of nature, bodies, and urban spaces. I’m also inspired by Naomi Oreskes’s work on ExxonMobil and I see my book as being in conversation with what she is doing.
Tell us about your work with the Women’s Environmental History Network.
I became a co-convenor of the Women’s Environmental History Network (WEHN) in 2019 and am currently on the advisory committee. WEHN’s goal is to support women and diverse scholars in environmental history and help them connect with each other. Since 2016, we’ve hosted a networking event every year at the annual conference for the American Society for Environmental History. We highlight books by members on our website and conducted a survey on disparities in publication rates between men and women within our field. To help address those gender disparities, we’ve also launched a program to assist women who receive revise and resubmit decisions.
For you, what is the toughest part of tackling a research project?
I generally love writing and editing but the research part is where I struggle. Sometimes I have a hard time getting started on a project and finding sources can be difficult for me. As the historians reading this know, you can’t always predict what your sources will say and finding a diversity of voices can sometimes be really tough.
Working outside of academia exacerbates these challenges. Many of my research roadblocks echo those described by Tanya Roth in her recent Contingent mailbag on publishing a book off the tenure-track. Since I do not work at a college or university, I do not have academic library access. That means no internet databases. No stacks of academic books on long-term loan. I do not have easy access to academic sources unless I buy them, so I have to utilize free sites like archive.org and z-library, pay for access at newspapers.com, or rely on the generosity of friends to download articles for me. This makes starting a new project difficult, and I am fortunate to be in the middle of projects right now. Who knows what’ll happen if I try to begin a second manuscript project somewhere down the line.
Without a traditional academic position, like a tenured or tenure-track professor, I also feel like I am in a bit of a vacuum. I am not part of a writing group so, again, I rely on the generosity of friends for most of the feedback I get. It can be difficult to trust your own ideas in the absence of other scholars with whom to reflect on those ideas. That means my partner Tom knows more than he might have ever wanted to about the environmental history of ExxonMobil.
Raechel (center left) at her 2018 dissertation defense with committee members: Neil Maher (left), Ann Fabian (center right), and Toby Jones (right).
What don’t people understand or appreciate about teaching history in a high school?
I’ve found that at independent schools, high school students are engaged, genuine, and energetic. They want to learn more about the world and are less jaded than the college students I’ve taught. Scholars should not overlook these important opportunities to connect with students at the high school level.
For you, what is the most rewarding part of teaching?
Connecting with my students and seeing the wheels turn in their brains as we work through difficult topics. I learned early on that doing research and writing wasn’t enough to sustain me. When I was finishing my dissertation, I started adjuncting at a local college, less for the money and more for the interaction with students. I know a lot of historians bristle at the idea of teaching the US survey every year, but I relish it. That’s where we get to connect with students and share what we know.
Tell us about some of the classes you teach.
I’m excited about the courses I’m teaching this year. I’ll be working with students in Advanced Placement United States History, Advanced Placement United States Government and Politics (APGOV), Environmental History, and a new course on Twenty-First-Century History, aka the History of Your Life. APGOV is also new for me and I spent a lot of time this past summer building a course rooted in student-centered learning with zero lectures—which really feels like a win. I’m looking forward to the conversations we will have, and know intrinsically that teaching civics in high school is crucially important to create active and informed citizens.
I’m also working on the lesson plans for the Twenty-First Century course. A friend of mine taught it at another school I’ve worked at, and I thought it was a provocative idea. Many U.S. history curricula don’t make it to the present—I’ve only been able to get there once so far. This course will help students better understand the world as we live in it, and I am planning units on the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Politics and Civil Rights, Climate and Natural Disasters, and Technology and Culture. Students will investigate these topics through provided material as well as their own research.
A view Raechel enjoys: New York City from Edgewater, New Jersey.
What advice or suggestions do you have for someone wanting to teach history for high school students?
I have A LOT to say about this! For a thorough rundown, read my article about applying for US history high school jobs on EnvHistNow.org.
A brief summary: As far as applications go, make sure you write a detailed and teaching-specific cover letter explaining what you can do in a classroom. Talk about your teaching methods. Schools love to hear about student-centered learning. Don’t focus too much on your academic writing but if you have received a big award, tell them. For your letter, one page only.
Cover letters matter less though than developing a specific resume just for teaching. Keep your resume to no more than two pages. Really highlight that you are a high school teacher, not just an academic.
You might also list some teaching references from your past. Schools probably won’t care about academic references as much but will value having administrators from a prior teaching job (not just fellow teachers) as references.
Also, get certified to teach in whatever state you are looking for jobs. Check out the requirements online. Do this even if you are not applying for public school positions. It will show your dedication, and you never know what could happen in the future.
Lastly but most importantly, find a recruiter. Carney Sandoe has helped me get multiple jobs and will do a lot of the work for you.
Raechel’s cat, Shadow, looking out the window and making sure she catches up on emails.
How has the pandemic affected you?
The pandemic has had a huge impact on my work. Wardlaw + Hartridge made the decision to be fully open for the entirety of last year. We ended up being remote for only a few weeks total. That meant biweekly COVID tests, masks all day, and most of my students attending classes virtually. Although I had some students in the classroom, many were in their NJ homes and some were at home abroad with up to a fourteen-hour time zone difference. For the most part, I felt safe at school, but I knew there was always a risk. Last year’s circumstances made teaching for me and learning for my students very difficult.
The pandemic also slowed down work on my books. With the extra pressure from the world, I pulled back on deadlines and other work associated with them just so I could breathe a bit.
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?
I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about a second manuscript project, but I would absolutely love to do something set in the 1930s–1940s United States. I’m just so fascinated by the Farm Security Administration artists, New Deal scholars, and that whole era in U.S. history. Part of that interest is inspired by Neil Maher’s first book Nature’s New Deal on the Civilian Conservation Corps. I also feel a personal connection to that era as both of my grandfathers served in the armed forces during World War II. I learned a lot from a week-long Gilder Lehrman seminar at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in 2018. I would love to go back and do some research there.
If you weren’t a scholar, what kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
This one’s hard! I don’t really want to do anything else. While I don’t think you can be an academic these days and NOT have some gripes, ultimately the work I do—teaching and studying the past—is very fulfilling to me. When I was younger, I dreamt about being an astronomer and studying far-away worlds, but unfortunately I wasn’t very good at math. Instead, I study the far-away worlds of the past.
