The first day of the fall semester of my senior undergraduate year, I ran into a friend of mine, a fellow history major, outside of the student union building at the research university we attended. We stopped and talked for a bit, updating each other on our lives and comparing our fall schedules. My friend had just been to the university bookstore, and he showed me a textbook he had just bought for a History of the Old South class that the history department was offering that fall. Intrigued, I sat in on the class and became immediately hooked. I added the class to my schedule and soon decided that I wanted to pursue southern history as a career. That decision set the course for my graduate studies. I spent years immersing myself in the upper southeast—including seemingly endless hours immersing myself in the pertinent scholarly literature, as well as traveling to special collections and sitting in manuscript and microfilm rooms poring through primary sources. And I learned how to practice a discipline I really did not understand as an undergraduate. [Read more…] about Scholar’s Call: The Joy of Becoming a Generalist