An Historian Beyond the University

Adam Bunch

This post is part of our series of Essays on the Future of Knowledge Mobilization and Public History Online.

I didn’t expect to get into public history. I’ve been lucky enough to find an unconventional path into it, almost accidentally, from a strange multimedia project to online writing to books and teaching and now a wide enough variety of projects that I’m able to make my living doing it. But I’ve never had a clear plan. My work is incredibly rewarding and I find it endlessly fascinating, but my day-to-day is usually a chaotic scramble of deadlines and unanswered emails, so I don’t often get a chance to stop and take a step back to wrap my head around my work and my approach. Thankfully, last year Active History invited me to take part in a workshop about “The Future of Knowledge Mobilization and Public History Online.” It was a wonderful two days, bringing together historians from across the country and giving me the chance to take that step back and try to articulate my own experiences.  

For me, it all started with the Toronto Dreams Project, a somewhat unusual history project I launched in 2010. It evolved out of thoughts I was having about history, psychogeography, public space and street art while working an unrewarding office job in the St. Lawrence Market neighbourhood — spending my lunch hours surrounded by heritage buildings and plaques. That summer, I began writing a series of short, fictional dreams about figures from Toronto’s past, each one related to events from their real lives. I printed copies of the dreams on custom-designed postcards and left them in public places with a connection to the lives of those historical figures.

The idea behind the Dreams Project was to hook people into learning more about the history of the city, surprising them with an unexpected connection to the past. I also included a URL on each card, so that anyone who stumbled upon one of the dreams could find it online along with links to articles about the true history that inspired it.

The response to the project was literally life-changing. It quickly developed an enthusiastic following online and led to countless other opportunities. The project was recognized with an honourable mention for the Governor General’s History Award for Community Programming, I was encouraged to leave dreams at historic sites and museums, and the Toronto Public Library asked me to develop writing workshops to teach children and adults how to create their own dreams. A high school class in New Brunswick even developed their own version of the project.And I’ve been able to take it on the road, leaving dreams in Toronto-history-related locations across Canada, Europe and the United Kingdom.

I also began writing some of the true stories myself, sharing them on my Toronto Dreams Project Historical Ephemera Blog so I could link the dreams to them. The response to those posts led to even more opportunities — and over the next decade and a half, it has gradually evolved into a full-time career. It began with being invited to cross-post some of those stories on the Spacing magazine blog, then led to the publication of a pair of books about Toronto history: The Toronto Book of the Dead and The Toronto Book of Love. I was approached by some wonderfully talented filmmakers, Ashley Brook and Kyle Cucco, to host and co-create a documentary series about Canadian history called Canadiana, which has taken us across the country. In recent years, I’ve begun working with Museum of Toronto on a few projects, including co-curating a Toronto sports history exhibit, leading walking tours, even delivering the eulogy for Conrad The Raccoon on the anniversary of his death. (He’d become a social media sensation in Toronto after his body was left on a downtown sidewalk for fourteen hours.) I’ve helped organize tours and speaking events for Doors Open Toronto. And I teach Toronto history courses at George Brown College and through Toronto Metropolitan University’s LIFE Institute.

With that precarious part-time work as a base, I’ve been able to transition into working on history full-time by finding other ways of engaging with the public as well: giving talks, leading walking tours, offering online courses, launching a local history newsletter,creating a local history festival… It all feels very precarious and the workload might be unsustainable, but so far it’s given me an unconventional path into doing something I find rewarding and that people seem to appreciate.

Part of why it’s viable, I suspect, is that I try to make my work as engaging, affordable and widely available as possible.In my experience, there is a huge public appetite for Canadian history. People want to learn more about their country and their communities. But they don’t always know where to find it, how many options they have, or realize how many exceptional historians, historic sites, and creative projects are sharing that history. So, a lot of what I spend my time doing is trying to reach a broad audience, finding people where they are, and giving them a way into that history if they want it — echoing how the Dreams Project worked, by bringing historical stories into public spaces and providing a connection to more information for people whose interest was piqued.

Years ago — after the Dreams Project began, but before I transitioned into history full-time — I worked as the Creative Director at a small marketing firm in Toronto. Most of our clients were not-for-profits like Kids Help Phone, the Gardiner Museum, and the United Nations’ refugee agency, who were themselves looking to raise awareness of their work. During my time there, I was exposed to a lot of ideas about engaging audiences, and I’ve tried to keep some of those lessons in mind.

With my work now, I try to share engaging and unexpected stories — history that will catch people’s attention — and then connect those stories to their broader historical context. The story of the Toronto Circus Riot for instance — sparked by a brawl between clowns and firefighters at a downtown brothel — has a lot to teach us about the influence of the Orange Order and systems of power in Victorian Toronto. My hope is that if I can catch someone’s attention, provide them with some of that broader context, and point them toward the work of historians who’ve explored that context more deeply, that person might be curious enough to want to carry on learning more.

I also try to share my work in as many different formats as possible, since people have their own preferences about how they like to engage with history — whether it’s books or walking tours or documentaries or online talks… And I try to offer as much of it as possible for free or on a pay-what-you-like basis. You can subscribe to my newsletter for free. You can watch all our episodes of Canadiana for free on YouTube. I try to post as much content as possible for free on social media, including copies of full newsletter posts and long threads on Bluesky. I offer my public walking tours on a pay-what-you-like basis, and I’ve recently started experimenting with doing the same for my public courses online.

In part, that’s because I want history to be free and affordable for everyone. But it also seems to be helpful financially. By attracting a broad audience — even if most people aren’t paying for access — I’m also reaching a greater number of people who are willing and able to support the work financially. I sometimes think of it in terms of the concept of a marketing “funnel”; I try to reach as many people as I can with work that is free-of-charge (the wide entrance to the funnel) and then a smaller number of those people end up supporting the work financially as well (the thin base of the funnel).

Twitter used to play a central role in that approach. I had a bigger following there than on any of my other social media accounts. Even though it didn’t pay anything directly, I put a lot of effort into crafting long threads about engaging historical stories that would occasionally go mildly viral. I put in that effort in large part because I think those stories are valuable for people to know, but it also helped grow an audience interested in hearing about my other projects, driving traffic toward some of my paying work.

With the implosion of Twitter, I’ve had to pivot away. But I’m always paying attention, of course, to creators I enjoy in other fields and what they’re doing. As a big baseball fan, I was inspired by watching the gradual migration of the baseball blogosphere into newsletters. So, I launched my own Toronto Time Traveller newsletter just before Elon Musk bought Twitter. It has since become the new central hub for my work. I only have about a third the audience I did on Twitter, but those subscribers seem even more willing to actively support my work.

The vast majority of my newsletter subscribers get it for free, but there is an option for them to support it with a few dollars a month if they like. It’s entirely voluntary and I don’t have any paywalls, so only about 4% of subscribers have chosen to become paid supporters — 160 people out of more than four thousand — but it’s enough to provide me with one more modest stream of income. And it gives me a place where I can plug all my other projects, helping to make sure that when I give a tour or a talk some people actually show up.

Similarly, by offering my online public courses on a pay-what-you-like basis, not only do I seem to be attracting more students than I did when there was a set fee, but so far I’ve gotten more in registration fees overall — even though the average-fee-per-student has been lower.

It’s only by having a wide variety of these projects that it all seems to work. No single one of them would be enough to pay rent. But by having a lot of projects on the go, I’ve managed to build enough little income streams to live on. In 2023, for instance, part-time teaching at the college provided less than a quarter of my income, with most other sources — from the newsletter to speaking fees to walking tours — hovering somewhere around 5–10% of it.

That variety also means that I’m not overly relying on any one source and it gives me the flexibility to respond to new opportunities and to the preferences of my audience. I’m hoping in the future I’ll somehow find time for even more new projects, whether it’s a podcast or applying for grants that would allow me to continue the Dreams Project with a wider diversity of voices than just my own, paying writers and artists to contribute their own dreams.

The newsletter also provides me with an opportunity to share other people’s work. Not only does it give me a place to publish my writing and plug my own projects, but to include local history news, links, and event listings in the hope it helps strengthen the local history community in some small way. And I have the same hope for my annual Festival of Bizarre Toronto History. It allows to me to invite academics, authors, tour guides and other storytellers to be part of the event, paying them for their participation while hopefully building some connections and community at the same time. I try to take every opportunity to share interesting work, links to sources, and communicate my own sense of enthusiasm and curiosity.

That is really what’s been driving me ever since I began the Toronto Dreams Project fifteen years ago.It’snot exactly a stable or lucrative lifestyle. Burnout occasionally threatens. I’ve only been able to successfully do it full-time for a few years now. And I suspect it’s only happened thanks to the privilege of having had enough free time in years gone by to build an online following before trying to make a living from it. But it’s incredibly rewarding and I’m incredibly grateful I get to do it.

And for now, at least, it seems to be working.

Adam Bunch is an independent historian of Toronto. You can learn more about his many projects at https://www.adambunch.com/.