Same anon who wants to be a Historian. One of my biggest dreams is to write a history book focusing on cultures primarily with POC. I have no idea how to actually get to that point though. Sorry if this is super vague but how does one get to be able to write a history book? Also, ive seen from other history teachers of research expeditions and going to other countries, is that really common among historians?

So I think the first step is that you need to narrow down your topic. The cultural history of people of color is an overwhelmingly massive topic, so to make the project manageable, I’d suggest trying to get more specific in your focus:

• Time Period: is there a particular period of cultural history that interests you? This could be as narrow as a decade (the 80s, the 70s, the 60s, the 20s?), or entire centuries (the 20th century? the 19th? earlier?), etc. 
• Location/Region: since people of color are all over the globe, you need to think about whether there’s a particular place you want to focus in on: is it a particular city? a particular country? a particular region? (Regional studies are very big right now.) 
• Subject Matter: one thing that might help you focus in is what kind of cultural history you’re interested in writing about: is there a particular medium that you want to look at? Are you interested in popular culture or niche avant garde art? Where are the centers of cultural production located, since that’s probably going to be a good place to start?
• People: are there particular historical figures you want to study, whether they’re cultural producers or critics or what have you? Where are their historical records – whether we’re talking about diaries and papers or oral histories or published works – collected?

In terms of writing a history book…unlike many other disciplines, history tends to focus more on monographs rather than articles, so your dissertation tends to be a longer exploration of a given topic rather than a bunch of articles slapped together, which lends itself better into being turned into a book. It also helps that because we’re writing about history, chronology lends a certain “A led to B and then B led to C” structure to our work. 

To give an example of how I wrote my book, I knew that the programs I was studying started mostly in the 30s and then there was another program in the 70s that was the last, and then I needed to fill in what happened in-between. My book isn’t strictly chronological – my first three chapters are all about the 30s, then there’s one chapter on the 40s, one chapter on the 60s, and one chapter on the 70s – but there’s a broad arc that helped me to figure out how to chop up the whole project into individual chapters that I could work on one-at-a-time.

In terms of research trips, it really depends on where you are versus where your sources are. As an American historian living in America, my trips were mostly to the National Archives and then to the various Presidential Libraries, which was more affordable (although perhaps less exciting) than if I’d been studying the history of Medieval Europe or pre-independence Congo or the Vietnam War, which would involve extended stays in the countries where the relevant archives are located. And yeah, you really have to go there to do the necessary archival work to produce a manuscript that people are going to consider worth publishing.