There's a line guaranteed to attract attention. But read it closely: I'm not saying he isn't the president. I'm just saying he isn't the 44th. Sounds crazy? Maybe, if you've been led to believe that there have been exactly 43 presidents before him. But as any good US historian knows, that isn't true.

I'm not talking about the presidents of the Continental or Confederation Congress, who preceded George Washington (those presidents did not preside over the nation, they presided over congress, much the way Vice President Joe Biden presides over the senate in his capacity as President of the Senate). Washington was indeed our nation's first president. Nor am I referring to Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America: Abraham Lincoln was our 16th president and Andrew Johnson our 17th.

I am referring to the ridiculous yet widely-accepted notion that Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and the 24th president of the United States because his two terms in office were non-sequential. He succeeded the 21st president, Chester Arthur, and the 23rd president, Benjamin Harrison, it is true, but that fact didn't make him two presidents any more than it made him two people. During Cleveland's second term, there had been a total of 23 men who had served as president, and the next president, William McKinley, was the 24th man to hold the office, not the 25th.

One might argue against this by noting that Cleveland's were the 22nd and 24th presidential administrations, and therefore he should be considered the 22nd and 24th presidents. But every two-term president is seen as presiding over two administrations; with re-election, presidents expect pro forma resignations from their cabinet officers, and it has been considered honorable to leave government service with the start of the boss' new term since Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson did it in 1793. By that standard, Cleveland presided over the 28th and 30th presidential administrations and President Obama is presiding over the 62nd presidential administration (that's counting every succession and every re-election).

the president who was re-elected after four years out of office should not be counted any differently than the fifteen who were re-elected while holding the office. So let's get it straight: Cleveland, the 22nd man to hold the office, was the 22nd and only the 22nd President of the United States, and Barack Obama is not the 44th, but the 43rd.

When I started at the University of Virginia I quickly became miserable, personally and professionally. My girlfriend was still in New York, and every other weekend either I would head north or she would come south. Having been an award-winning history major at Baruch College, where I was a big fish in a small pond, I soon found myself a small fish in a big pond. My work habits were difficult to maintain, my studies suffered, and I earned more Bs than As. Although my advisor Michael Holt, Grace Hale, and possibly Brian Balogh had faith in my prospects, it would appear that I failed to suitably impress Ed Ayers and Gary Gallagher, in retrospect with good reason. I left after completing the MA.

With the recession still on and CUNY offering me a stipend, I decided to give history another shot, but immediately suffered another setback. Noting that I had an MA, my new advisor, Jim Oakes, recommended I take the written comprehensive before I even started classes, and I failed.

With this background it should be easy to understand why I suffered from imposter syndrome. And although I passed the writtens on my second try a year later, I earned a B on my second major paper.

I took refuge in student government, a pursuit which brought early success. Elected to represent my department at the Doctoral Students’ Council, I was immediately elected to represent the DSC at the University Student Senate, where I quickly became Vice Chair for Graduate Affairs, was appointed to represent the students on a committee of the Board of Trustees, and found myself regularly rubbing elbows with senior administrators. Although I denied it to myself at the time, it was a way to avoid not only my studies. There remained, that constant, small voice inside that told me that I wasn’t up to the task of doctoral work.

But even then there were signs of the success to come. I published reviews in my minor and major and I earned a rare A from notoriously difficult grader Laird Bergad in his class on the history of Brazil. And I earned an A on my “outside” paper on a topic unrelated to my planned dissertation on industrialization and slavery. Sadly, I spent more time focusing on my doubts than on these successes.

Still, I plugged on. I passed my orals and switched my thesis topic and advisor, moving into the twentieth century and the history of civil rights (which had been the topic of that “outside” paper). Firmly back on track, I researched, wrote, and defended my dissertation.

But now it was 2008, and the job market had tanked. I thought that what remaining academic jobs there were would go to the “elite” scholars—those who had stayed at UVa or worked with pedigree advisors at Ivy League schools. I couldn’t compete with people like Wayne Hsieh, who finished at UVa after four years and immediately landed a tenure-track job at Yale, his undergraduate alma mater. Wanting to stay in New York for the sake of my wife and daughter—where the chances of landing a position seemed particularly abysmal—I focused on applying for administrative jobs, trading on the connections I had made through my student government work.

My advisor, Clarence Taylor, as well as Brian Purnell, one of my readers, urged me to submit my dissertation to presses. It doesn’t cost anything, I thought; nothing ventured, nothing gained. A year after my defense I was under contract with the University Press of Kentucky. I decided to go on the academic job market in earnest.

After two years on the market, however, I once again began to doubt myself. Most of the rejections didn’t faze me, but the ones where I came very close—especially those in New York—were hard to handle. After not getting a job offer at BMCC, where I was the inside candidate, I didn’t even get an interview at BCC, where I was an adjunct and former sub. Then I was rejected for an adjunct job. Perhaps my book contract was just luck, I thought. I doubted my skills with history, I doubted my abilities as a teacher, I doubted I had the personality to win over a search committee.

And then, suddenly, it was over. My book was published and I had a job.

I didn’t think about my imposter syndrome again—by then I had long known the term—until this past weekend when I attended a conference at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. There, toe-to-toe with serious scholars (about a third of whom were from Oxford or Cambridge, either as grad students or faculty), I held my own, engaging in incisive discussions inside and outside of panels with the likes of Gareth Davies, Kevin Yuill, Catherine Clinton, and even a team from UVa—two ABDs and a recent PhD. (Particularly noteworthy were my interactions with Clinton, a seemingly imposing imposing figure during my senior year at Baruch when she was a visiting full professor, who now, as holder of a chair at Queens University Belfast, is “Catherine.”)

But what I found most remarkable was the imposter syndrome on evidence among Oxford and Cambridge grad students. It was then, while commiserating with them, that I finally realized that I was “cured.” I had arrived. I no longer have any doubts about where I stand in our field. I can hold my own with some of the finest scholars in the world.

I didn’t write this to brag. (Much of my career, as you can see, has been nothing to brag about.) Rather, I wrote it to encourage those grad students who may be experiencing similar setbacks to those I faced. My last post contained an unduly harsh admonition to those who have been procrastinating, but I want you all to know just how successful you can be in our field despite seemingly debilitating failures. Focus on the positive, stay flexible, keep working at a good pace, and remember that you are capable of doing great work. If I can do it, you can too—if you really want to.

As the insider at BMCC I considered the entire semester one long job interview, and was interviewed by the committee and then, as a finalist, by the provost. When I ultimately did not get the job, and found myself scrambling for adjunct work in January—again with no interviews scheduled for the AHA (Boston)—I considered writing this “revisited” piece. Ultimately I decided against it, worrying that I would come off as bitter at an academic market that had let me down. After all, my credentials were about as solid as they could be: a book in press, full-time teaching experience, copious committee experience, strong references. Things soon went from bad to worse: in March I didn’t even make the interview cut at Bronx Community College, which had two tenure-track jobs available, and in April I was rejected for an adjunct job—an adjunct job, for Pete’s sake—at New York City College of Technology.

But yesterday I received my third full-time job offer in as many weeks, and it now seems as if every three to four days I withdraw from a search after being offered an interview. As I prepare for the move to my new tenure-track job at Governors State University, an upper-division college with graduate and doctoral students outside Chicago where I will be designing the undergraduate history major and new MA program in history education, this seems like a good opportunity to reflect on the market and offer some fresh advice to recent grads and ABDs at the CUNY Grad Center.

A la Joe Sramek, let’s start with the stats. Over the past two years, I applied for a total of 281 academic positions: 181 tenure-track (or otherwise permanent); 58 replacement (visiting, sub, etc.), 36 postdocs, and 6 public historian (i.e. in-house historian at the Department of Defense). I had (or was offered) 15 first-round interviews (8 of which for tenure-track or permanent jobs) and 7 on-campus interviews (4 for tenure-track/permanent). The result: five job offers, two of which were tenure/track or permanent and three for visiting positions (including the two visiting positions I accepted last year).

(A word about “permanent” non-tenure track: this is a category of job about which I was unaware prior to my search. Perhaps it is a new phenomenon, as colleges seek to retain their options to lay off faculty in the wake of ever-tighter budgets. But I interviewed for two of these positions and was offered one, which ultimately I did not take because fortunately within days I had a tenure-track offer. Announcements for these jobs typically contain the word “renewable” but otherwise appear to be replacement jobs, but the applicant should ask how renewable they are during the interview. The two that resulted in interviews for me each involved three-year contracts, permanently renewable.)

Last year, my main regret was that I hadn’t gone on the job market in the semester of my defense—fall 2008. I still regret that, as the market was better then than it would be the following year. But my current regret is that I didn’t promote myself adequately as the author of a book until it was actually published. When I say adequately I mean listing the book on the first page of the CV, centered, below the address, above all other content. I had been listing the book under “publications,” on page two of the CV. Once I made it more prominent I received a flurry of interview offers, and that’s the key in this job market: you have to have a stand-out CV and cover letter. These are the tools for getting from the application to the interview—and to do that you will need to beat the longest odds of the process.

In this abysmal job market, search committees are receiving upwards of 200 applications for each position. It’s easy to understand why: just read Perspectives—the AHA monthly magazine—and you’ll see that since 2008 the number of PhDs granted in history has exceeded the number of job openings. From these 200-odd applications, search committees must select 10-12 candidates for an initial interview. So it’s basically twenty-to-one against getting an interview. The odds get significantly better after that: 3-4 candidates get on-campus interviews, and if the top choice turns down the job (as I did for one permanent job and one temporary job) you only need to be in the top two to get it. In short, you need to get out of the general pool of applicants and into the much smaller pool of interviewing candidates. To do that you need a solid cover letter and a stand-out CV.

Your cover letter should be between 1.5 and 2 pages. The body should include a lengthy paragraph on your dissertation (followed by a short paragraph on your current scholarship if you have moved beyond your dissertation), a paragraph on your teaching experience, a paragraph on your teaching philosophy, and a brief statement about your service experience if you have any. (While at the Graduate Center it pays to serve on two or three committees; ideally you’ll serve on at least one that is college-wide. Ask your DSC rep to put you in touch with the students serving on the Committee on Committees so that you can get on a college-wide committee.) The introduction should briefly list your major accomplishments as they relate to the particular job (“with my dissertation now under contract and with copious experience teaching both American history and Western Civilization, I am very excited by the opportunity to apply for the assistant professorship at Beaufunk State University, Juneau”) and the conclusion should briefly restate the fact that your quals make you a good fit for the job and that you are available for a telephone or Skype interview and will be attending the AHA. Scholarship and teaching should come first and second: respectively for a research university job and reverse for a community college job; use your own best judgment for the many jobs in-between.

Everyone in this market has a Ph.D. or soon will (even for community college jobs), and everyone who’s in serious contention for the jobs you want has a list of awards, good references, and a solid transcript. You will stand out with a book (again, aggressively promoted on the CV from the moment you get a contract) and with full-time teaching experience. Is it possible to get a job in this market with neither? Sure. But the odds are worse than abysmal. So you need to get these things. The full-time temporary teaching experience will come through persistent applications and a willingness to travel (especially now that CUNY has cut virtually all substitute lines). The book contract will be a harder trick, so you need to put a lot of energy into that. It’s not just luck: you need to write an excellent dissertation on a topic that fills a gap in the existing literature or is otherwise very sexy. But you also need to have a good relationship with your advisor, who will recommend appropriate presses; you need to write your dissertation in a style that is conducive to becoming a book; you need to develop a strong book proposal; and you need to respond to the anonymous peer criticism with grace and thoughtfulness, showing the editors that you’re someone they can work with comfortably.

Here comes the tough love. If you’ve been working on your PhD for more than a decade, or you’re having problems getting your advisor or committee members to agree to schedule a defense, stop. Just stop. Get out and find another career. You’re not going to get a book published and you’re not going to get a full-time job—so you can forget about joining the professoriate. No college is looking for a failed historian, and the sooner you accept that you need to get out, the better it will be for you. And if you can’t count on good references you are in for continual frustration. I know this is harsh, but it’s reality, and the sooner you accept it the happier you’ll be. If you don’t get out now you can expect a career on the adjunct circuit—and even adjunct jobs are getting harder to come by. If you haven’t already done so, file for your MPhil and move on.

But if all indications are that you’ve got a shot at this, you need to get on the market with gusto, starting with the fall semester of the academic year in which you will defend. Get an Interfolio account, line up your references, get them to upload their letters directly to Interfolio, and ask them to renew their letters each year you’re still on the market. Use your Interfolio references for EVERYTHING: even online applications, which ask for your referees’ contact information, can be given individual Interfolio e-mail addresses (instructions at Interfolio). Apply for every single job for which you feel qualified, based on your scholarship and your teaching experience—including temporary jobs outside of your scholarship as long as you’ve taught in that field. Check the listings every week at higheredjobs.com, historians.org, H-Net, and cuny.edu. Apply for each job significantly early to meet the deadline—and be conscious of whether the search calls for delivery by e-mail, online, or post. Plan on attending the AHA, but don’t be dejected if you don’t get scheduled interviews for it (I never did). At the AHA, check the job board and apply. I applied for two jobs at AHA Boston and got one interview while I was there. Keep checking and applying into the spring. Both of my tenure-track/permanent job offers were the result of applications with spring deadlines.

If you can get into the interview pool, you’ve got an excellent chance of landing a good job. And the more you interview, the better you’ll get at showing what’s great about you—and the more your chances improve. Because once you’re in that pool, it’s much more about personality and delivery than paper credentials. But there are some things you’ll need to keep in mind long before you get to the interview stage.

Most importantly, you need to start regularly reflecting on your teaching. You don’t need to be an excellent teacher to get a job, even at a teaching institution like a community college, but you do need to demonstrate that you think about your teaching and are looking for ways to improve it. It’s generally better to talk about the mistakes you’ve made as a teacher—as long as you can discuss how you overcame them—than it is to recite all the latest pedagogical techniques you’ve been trying.

Give some serious thought—preferably long before the interview—on why you want to be a teacher.

Once you’re offered an interview, research the school and think carefully about why you want to work there, why you think you’re a good fit, and what you want to know from the interviewers. Yes, I know, you want to work there because you want a job—any job—and all you really want to know from them, in this market, is whether or not they’ll hire you. But part of the process is to pretend you don’t feel that way. So do as much research as you can in advance, take notes, and write down questions. The questions, by the way, are as much about showing you’re serious as about getting more information. After all, if you only get one offer, you’re going to take it. But if you get more than one, you may not have a lot of time to make up your mind, so it pays to know as much as you can. You should ask about the teaching load and opportunities for research funding, service commitments, where the faculty tend to live, etc. But the question I always lead with is “tell me more about the students.”

You’ll probably be asked about using technology in the classroom. You might also be asked about online courses. Be honest. Talk about what technologies you like, and where you feel you could use more training. If you haven’t taught an online course (I haven’t), it pays to be able to say you set up a blog for your students and posted questions on it each week for them to discuss. But as with everything else, don’t just do it for the sake of being able to say you did it; reflect on the results and be prepared to discuss them.

Don’t ever say “pedagogy” in an interview; for that matter, don’t use all that many GRE words at all: you’ll come off as out of touch, incapable of relating to your students. You should speak in a relaxed manner, using plain English. Answer questions directly, and don’t be evasive; just like in your orals, don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know.” Hopefully you won’t have to say it that much in each interview.

Be positive; don’t be glib, trite, or flip; take the interview seriously even while showing that you don’t take yourself so seriously. I was once asked about my experience teaching junior high school. I smiled and said “the most important thing I learned teaching junior high school was that I didn’t want to teach junior high school.” Needless to say, I didn’t get that job. Only in retrospect did I realize that they were asking how I could relate to students pursuing degrees in education. But more importantly, if I wasn’t prepared to discuss something on my CV, I shouldn’t have put it on my CV. A far better answer, obviously, would have been something like “it taught me just how hard teachers work and gave me a tremendous respect for people pursuing that calling.”

Be prepared with a list of courses you’d like to teach, not just the courses you’ve already taught. As a full-timer you will likely teach at least one or two courses a year beyond the introductory surveys. In interviews for two of the jobs I was ultimately offered, I was asked about my willingness to teach in my minor, so you should think about how you would design such courses. For your surveys, be prepared to list the textbooks you’ve assigned.

Try to think about the process from the interviewers’ perspective. Reading more than 200 cover letters and CVs, then meeting to discuss them and choose interviewees, then debating the choice of finalists. But that’s just the logistics: they’re often very anxious about making the right choice. They’ll be working with the successful candidate for at least seven years, if not many more; that’s a big commitment and they don’t want to hire someone with whom they won’t get along. But once you can relate to that experience, it will be helpful if you can find a way to show that empathy during the interview. People who can relate to different perspectives make good colleagues.

Don’t be put off by what appears to be a bad attitude on the part of the interviewers. You may think they don’t like you, but they don’t know you, and they might be role-playing to test your responses. You also might rub someone the wrong way; be cool, and you might win over everyone else. (That person you’re rubbing the wrong way might actually be disliked by everyone else.)

The more you interview, the more you’ll find that your answers seem (to you) rehearsed. Just remember that this is the first time your interviewers are hearing them, so behave accordingly. This holds true even with multiple interviews on the same campus: the dean hasn’t heard your spiel with the committee, so just say it all again. You’ll develop a few catch phrases, and that’s great: it will build your confidence, and confidence (as long as it’s not arrogance) comes off well in an interview.

Full-day campus interviews will include a meal, but late in the day your energy will start to flag. You might have breakfast with the committee chair, a meeting with the full committee, lunch with committee members, a teaching demo or job talk (to which the entire community might be invited, a walking tour of the campus, and one-on-one meetings with the chair, dean, and/or provost. Bring granola bars to keep your energy up; eat them when you’re getting tired, rather than waiting until you’re hungry. Because of adrenaline and anxiety you might not actually get hungry until much later.

With the teaching demo or job talk, style and substance both matter. As with the orals, if you don’t know the answer, don’t fake it; admit it candidly and explain that you use such moments in your teaching as an opportunity to show how professors aren’t omniscient, and that you turn it around and ask the students what they think the answer is. Try to teach towards your specialty, both because that’s where your expertise is and also because it shows how you relate your scholarship to your teaching. In one demo I was asked to lecture on the social and political changes of the Age of Jackson. As a scholar of African-American history, I focused on the growth of abolitionism during that era and the political changes regarding the expansion of slavery. I didn’t even mention Andrew Jackson himself until the Q&A. I got the job.

A good way to prepare for the teaching demo: teach (duh). But here’s a good way to prepare for the job talk: convert a dissertation chapter into a fifteen-minute presentation, then start delivering it at conferences. You can find a list of Calls for Papers at H-net; find the conferences that seem most likely to accept your paper, write a proposal, and send it off. After you’ve delivered the paper a few times, the job talk will be second nature—and all those presentations are lines on the CV!

When you get a job offer, ask how long you have before they need a decision. Then IMMEDIATELY inform any other search committees for whom you have interviewed but not been told whether or not you got those jobs. If it’s true, say “I’d really rather work with you, but I need to make a decision soon.” I did that, and within two days I had a better job offer—which I accepted.

Try to avoid pulling out of jobs which you have already accepted, but you can exploit the job-value hierarchy. It is understood that you can and will back out of adjunct commitments for a full-time job, and you can back out of a temporary job for a permanent job. This is not unethical as long as you have not signed a contract (and may be ethical in any event when it comes to backing out of adjunct contracts—just be sure you’re not breaking the law). But if you have signed a contract for a temporary full-time job, you must meet that commitment. You also may not ethically back out of one job for a better job in the same tier, i.e. backing out of a tenure-track 5-5 for a tenure-track 4-4, or backing out of an adjunct job with an hour-long commute for one closer to home. In this regard a verbal acceptance is ethically binding, so it pays to ask for as much time as possible and not commit until you’re sure you’re ready. Just don’t miss out! It’s better to turn down a better offer in the same tier later than to lose one job hoping for a better offer that may never come.

You can imagine just how excited and relieved I am to be off the market. But like Joe Sramek before me, I felt that I could not leave for my future on the tenure track without imparting what I have learned to my fellow CUNY PhDs and ABDs. See you at AHA Chicago!

What this episode indicates is something that many New Yorkers already knew about our plutocrat mayor: that he is not one of us. I don't mean that he's from Boston; most New Yorkers originally hail from elsewhere. I mean that he is not representative of us, he doesn't get us, he hardly even pretends. He doesn't value our opinions, and when he hears them, as with the snow, he attributes them to venal self-interest (which says more about him than it does of us). I can't say I disagree with all of his signature policies; his successful smoking ban in bars and restaurants, his push for calorie counts on menus, his increase of the bike lanes and pedestrian-only plazas, and his unsuccessful attempt to decrease the number of cars in lower Manhattan all strike me as improvements to New York City and our way of life. It's the way he does it, running roughshod over our feelings and opinions. Another recent example, besides the poor way he handled the blizzard, was his appointment of a media executive to head the Board of Education. Tone-deaf.

And so I invoke a sad episode in history for comparison. What made Marie Antoinette's statement historically significant was that it showed just how cut off she was from her people, just how little she understood life for everyday Parisians. For her, when the royal pantry was out of bread, she could simply have cake (another type of bread). But for the hungry of France, there was no such option. She could hardly conceive of such a life. And "Mayor Mike," while obviously not as distant (he did, after all, have a middle-class upbringing), is sufficiently distant nonetheless.

Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine. Will Bloomberg's political career suffer the same fate?

Obviously the historical profession needs to work harder to ensure that children at all levels are assigned quality history textbooks, and another problem is the ability of partisans of historical "pseudofacts" to use the internet to spread false messages about the past. But as an internet user and sometime blogger, I'd prefer to meet the challenge head-on. So here's my rebuttal to the notion that there may have been as many as 65,000 African-Americans in the Confederate Army:

Certainly we can dismiss out of hand the notion that black soldiers served under General Stonewall Jackson, who died in May of 1863, nearly two years before the Confederate government authorized the recruiting of black troops. Further, the fact that blacks were not allowed to serve in the Confederate Army until weeks before the end of the war creates a logistical problem with the veracity of the statement. Could the ragtag remnants of the Confederate government and army even have mustered in (let alone trained) 65,000 volunteers of any color in that short time span? And if they did, wouldn't they have been able to win a few battles and prolong the war into at least the early summer of 1865? With 65,000 fresh recruits, why would General Lee have surrendered when he did?

So clearly we're not talking about actual soldiers, legally recruited and trained. What then are we talking about? Assuming that this figure of 65,000 was not made out of whole cloth, is there any other way to arrive at it?

If we include, in addition to the handful of actual black soldiers that did enlist to fight for the south during the Confederacy's final days, the blacks (most, if not all of whom, presumably, were slaves) who served support functions for southern white soldiers and officers during the war, perhaps we could get to that figure, but I doubt it. But what if we counted all the slaves owned by confederate army officers? If we consider these human beings as personal property, as slave-owners certainly did (and modern Confederate apologists certainly still do), then being owned by a soldier in the Confederate army would make them "part" of the army in the manner in which a soldier's canteen is "part" of the army. These people may never have seen a battlefield; many of them may have even abandoned their owners after hearing news of the Emancipation Proclamation; nevertheless, Confederate apologists might still consider them somehow part of the army, and when added together, they might meet or even exceed the figure of 65,000.

But this seems to me the very definition of comparing apples with oranges. Even if 65,000 slaves were coerced (with offers of freedom or more direct modes of coercion) into the Confederate ranks, how does that compare to the 180,000 former slaves and free blacks who willingly and eagerly fought for their freedom on the Union side?

Look, some black southerners served in the Confederate army in the final days of the Civil War. OK. And there's a nut down in Ashville, North Carolina, a black man who marches to the town square every morning in full Confederate regalia. But it just isn't important enough to record beyond a footnote--certainly in comparison to the service of black soldiers in the Union army. The attempt to inflate the figure is an attempt to make black Confederate soldiers more relevant than they were--and thereby justify the false claim that the Civil War was not about slavery.

What do you think?

Tribeca was a different neighborhood back then. De-industrialization had left this thriving commercial neighborhood with numerous piers on the Hudson virtually an empty shell. Dark warehouses and loading docks piqued the curiosity of the elementary-school student traveling in and out every day. Independence Plaza--designed as an attempt to remake the neighborhood as a residential gem--was more of a dangerous housing project than an urban oasis.

And of course, there were the twins. Recently completed--but for all I knew as a seven-year-old, longstanding fixtures--these two shining edifices of glass and steel represented the anchor of a neighborhood desperately trying to recover. Strength amidst squalor. How excited I was--we all were--when the school bus driver would ask, on a morning with particularly light traffic, if we wanted to go see them! Instead of turning on Harrison Street, he'd stay on the West Side Highway--then a dark nest of drugs and prostitution under the old viaduct--and pass the gleaming World Trade Center, the "twin towers," before making a U-turn at Battery Park.

But most mornings were mundane--in a Greenwich Village sort of mundaneity. My stop was on University Place and East 13th Street. There was a corner deli where I learned to steal candy and subsequently learned not to steal candy--still there, with different owners--and there was a second-floor window where a fat man would parade around naked--also still there, but presumably with a different tenant. Stromboli Pizza--which we called Amadeo's after the boxer-turned restaurateur who owned it and made every pizza by hand, flipping the dough in the air--is also still there, but Amadeo himself is long gone. (His picture remains, but the owners are not related.)

We'd line up and board the bus and it would take us south on University Place--University was a two-way street then, and New York University then gave as much to the neighborhood as it took--then around Washington Square Park and down LaGuardia Place into Soho. Then it was west on Broome and north on Hudson to drop off the P.S. 3 students and pick up my friend Uri Feiner, who today is godfather to my daughter. Then West on Christopher to the West Side Highway. Finally, east on Harrison and south on Greenwich to what was originally called P.S. 3 Annex, a small elementary school at the top of what seemed like an incredibly long flight of stairs to a plaza with a playground beside a very tall building.

Mundane also meant an early exposure to Pink Floyd. The driver blasted The Wall--that paean to adolescent male angst--and the whole bus would sing along in the afternoons when he'd reach "Another Brick in the Wall, Part Two." Our favorite line, naturally, was "We don't need no education."

One day, during recess, Shawn Adams and I took advantage of the lax security among our teachers, and ran off along the promenade on Independence Plaza's western edge, crossing above Harrison Street and exiting the Plaza at Franklin Street for an unsupervised slice of pizza and a turn or three at "Space Invaders" or "Asteroids." The pizzeria may have also had a bar; it was certainly dark, and knowing what I now know about the neighborhood then, I consider us lucky to have gotten back to school unscathed, let alone our absence undetected.

One horrible morning, Etan Patz didn't get on the bus. His stop was on West Broadway and Prince Street. We weren't friends; he was one year behind me, and a year is huge in elementary school. But everyone on the bus soon knew just about everything there seemed to be to know about him, with pictures plastered all over downtown Manhattan. And after that, one of my parents always walked me to the bus stop.

Graduation came in 1982 and it was off to junior high without a second thought. High school, military service, my twenties, college and graduate school, all have come and gone without visits to Independence Plaza. I've sped by many times on West Street--now without the viaduct--towards the battery--now without the twins.

After thirty years, Tribeca is a different place. Yes, Independence Plaza and the warehouse buildings are still here, but the Plaza is now the posh urban oasis its builders envisioned--and far too expensive for a BMCC professor. The warehouses, however, are more accessible, with trendy restaurants, bars, and coffee houses. The piers have been replaced by the World Financial Center and Stuyvesant High School. There's less room for imagination, but there's also less danger.

I'm glad to be back.

First, to parallel Joe's story, let me tell you about my year. I went on the market with over 100 applications. I had two telephone interviews for tenure-track jobs and two local campus interviews for replacement faculty jobs (in my case, CUNY full-time substitute positions) and had exactly zero interviews at the 2010 San Diego AHA (although I enjoyed attending panels in the balmy weather). I was also placed on a pre-interview shortlist for one tenure-track job but didn’t make the interview cut. All four of the preliminary interviews resulted in second-round on-campus interviews. One of the tenure-track jobs resulted in a rejection; the other ended in a cancelled search (for administrative reasons; I’ve been encouraged to re-apply next month when the search is reopened). I was offered both replacement jobs. I still don't have a tenure-track job, but under the circumstances it was a successful year. I am a full-time faculty member with a full-time salary and summers off—and the opportunity to try again.

Some will advise you not to go on the market the semester you defend. Others will say you won't get a tenure-track job in this market without a current replacement job and a book contract. I say you should apply for anything and everything for which you are qualified. Serendipity, synchronicity, and dumb luck are incredibly important and underrated factors—and completely beyond your control. But if you don't apply, you definitely won't have a shot. The financial outlay is minimal—the cost of postage for those departments that are still using snail mail, and the cost of Interfolio dossier service. The energy outlay, however, is significant. Be prepared for 8-12 hours per week in the fall, and 1-2 hours per week in the spring—not counting interviews. The more you do in advance, the easier the individual applications will be.

Use Interfolio dossier service. Do you really want to bother your referees for every application? Get three trusted faculty members to write strong anonymous letters of reference, and have them upload them to your Interfolio account. You should also order a copy of your doctoral transcript to be sent to Interfolio. Once your dossier is complete, you can order Interfolio to send the documents in any combination—by e-mail or post—directly to each search committee. Interfolio will send your documents for $6 per application. You can also upload your CV to Interfolio, but I don’t recommend that, because you’ll want to change your CV too often for the service to be useful.

Some more documents you’ll need, in varying combinations, for most applications: A research agenda (what you plan to do with your dissertation, and what you’re thinking about doing next); a research philosophy (how you approach the task); a teaching philosophy (ditto); three writing samples (a full chapter, a truncated chapter, and something 2-3 pages long--like a book review); your dissertation table of contents as a separate file; sample syllabi (from courses you’ve already taught as well as for 2-3 courses you’d like to teach as electives); and your teaching evaluations (scan your copies and combine them into a single document). If you plan to apply for post-docs, you should prepare a research proposal. And if you plan to apply for public history jobs with the federal government and are a military veteran, scan your DD-214.

And then there’s the cover letter. I have five draft versions and I still tailor them for each application (beyond de rigueur address and date changes). My main cover letter is for research universities. Then I have one for small colleges and community colleges; one for replacement jobs; and one for replacement jobs at small or community colleges. (Small and community colleges prize teaching flexibility—if you’ve taught in your minor or in other disciplines that’s a plus—and replacement searches usually aren’t looking for a permanent colleague). Finally, I have a cover letter for post-docs (sometimes they require it). The cover letters for jobs should include a section on your scholarship and a section on your teaching. I put scholarship first for the big colleges and teaching first for the small colleges. But read the call for applications carefully and add or subtract based on what each search committee wants.

Check out these three articles: “How to Make Your Application Stand Out,” by Rob Jenkins (Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2009); “Dodging the Anvil,” by Thomas H. Benton (Chronicle of Higher Education, January 4, 2010); and “Subtle Cues Can Tell an Interviewer ‘Pick Me,’” by Phyllis Korkki (New York Times, September 13, 2009).

The fall is application season, with deadlines usually beginning on October 1 but sometimes stretching into late December. During the late fall telephone interviews begin, and most primary interviews are conducted in the early winter, often at the AHA. In the late winter and early spring there will be on-campus interviews and applications for late searches and replacement jobs (these are called substitutes at CUNY and visiting professors elsewhere). Don’t give these short shrift; until you have a job offer, you should remain actively on the market, and being a replacement is far better than adjuncting.

Where are the jobs listed? Once a week I check historians.org, H-Net, and CUNYFirst. And tell the office administrator to keep you on the grad student listserv--it's how I first heard about all my actual jobs except my current one.

Lastly, don’t forget to keep up with your scholarship. Your break after your defense should be no longer than twice the length of the break you took after your orals. Get to work on your book proposal. There’s no better way to cheer yourself in a horrible job market than with the news of a book contract (and it’s helpful in landing those jobs, too)!