Taylor needs six to seven years to produce a book, he said. He describes a laborious process that depends on summers, sabbaticals, research fellowships and presenting papers at conferences.
Along with his success as a scholar and author, Taylor remains committed to teaching and excels at it, colleagues say. "The traditional way college teachers are evaluated is in scholarship, teaching and service," said one, Karen Halttunen at Davis. "Normally, you find a teacher whose books are stimulating, but whose lectures are dull, or one who's uninvolved in the community. Alan excels in all three."
The two courses Taylor was teaching last fall offered striking contrasts. On one particular Friday his upper-level class in colonial history studied images, from Queen Elizabeth to the Virginia settlements. Taylor was quiet as he moved around the classroom seeking responses, willing to wait. Most of the students were history majors whom he'd had before.
In a freshman-level survey of American history through the Civil War, a large afternoon lecture, Taylor's demeanor changed. He paced the stage, spoke dramatically using a microphone and drove home his points about the Constitutional Convention with bullet-like precision. Asked about the contrast, he said, "You have to be able to adjust to a different audience."
Taylor's next project, already well under way, is a study of the borderlands of the Northeast--a hot topic among historians who are intrigued by questions of identity and how people do or do not fit into existing social, racial and ideological frameworks. As in previous works, he includes marginalized people so long left out of formal history.
The paradox of borders, Taylor said, "is that they are intended to separate people, but end up attracting them instead." That is also the case along the Canadian border, which continues to be a magnet for settlement and development on both sides.
Taylor's book will examine the "late loyalists," former colonists who, well after the Revolution, immigrated to Canada. The book will focus on upstate New York and the Lake Ontario region. Taylor sees similar phenomena along the Maine border, though, and he discusses them in a Maine History article about the tragicomic career of George Ulmer, assigned during the War of 1812 to Eastport, across the border from St. Stephen, which was then in the hands of the British. Ulmer, failing to perceive the local and regional interest in commerce as opposed to an embargo, was ultimately sacked.
"As historians redeem the places and peoples previously dismissed as marginal, as peripheral, we can perceive the truth that every region is in the center of some wider network of human exchange of people, goods, and cultures," Taylor writes. "We start to perceive a fuller North American history where borders are invitations rather than walls."
The article strikes a rare personal note as well, detailing Taylor's experience as a graduate student at Brandeis, where his faculty advisor implored him to forsake his desire to write a thesis about Maine, warning that it would kill his job prospects. Maine was too marginal. "Historians treated Plymouth, Dedham, Andover, and Newburyport as if they were microcosms of the American whole," Taylor said. The advisor suggested three possible topics: a history of dreaming, a history of the chicken in American social life or a community study on Cape Cod. "For a time I joked that my dissertation would be a history of dreams about chickens on Cape Cod," he writes, noting that eventually he found a new advisor.
Overcoming marginalization is at the root of Taylor's achievement, according to his friend and colleague Charles Walker. Walker praises Taylor's "brilliant understanding of the first political party system" in William Cooper's Town, where he uncovered the transition from the Federalists to the Jeffersonians who succeeded them. "It's deeply moving to see how people who were marginalized were empowered," Walker said. "His discovery is one of the great contributions to historical writing in the last century."
Taylor, as a contemporary historian, gives full voice to those formerly excluded from American narratives. Yet he is, in his own estimation, old-fashioned in his conviction that "truth is an objective worth pursuing. Many academics have given up on it, even as an ideal." Such relativism comes at great cost, he said. "It drains academic work of a lot of its excitement."
Making judgments isn't something Taylor shies away from. "[He's] a master of clarity and analysis." Ulrich said. "Whatever topic he takes on, he illuminates."
He does so without a lot of fuss. Whether it's his Maine upbringing, his desire to balance family with career considerations or his decision to remain at a less-famous institution, Taylor seems content to continue his work in unexplored corners of history. He isn't looking for any new prizes, which are, in the case of the Pulitzer and Bancroft, generally once-in-a-lifetime events. "I have all the prestige I need," he said. "I want to be able to go where my principles take me."
