Professors often have outside interests that would leave their students taken aback. Your organic chemistry instructor might do local theater in his spare time. Your existentialism professor might like to brew beer when she isn’t at Sacramento State.

Joseph Palermo, history professor, is not just a published expert on 20th century U.S. history, but he is also a blogger for the Huffington Post website with a worldwide following.

“I ended up getting in on the ground floor,” Palermo said about his association with the Huffington Post. “I’ve always been interested in journalism, and was lucky enough to meet Arianna Huffington when she was thinking of starting her blog.”

Palermo met Arianna Huffington when she was one of the many candidates running for governor during the 2003 recall election; Sac State sponsored a debate for the top five candidates. She was pictured during her run for governor holding a book about Robert Kennedy written by Palermo.

The Huffington Post launched two years later as a progressive answer to conservative sites such as the Drudge Report. According to TechCrunch, the Huffington Post reached nearly 6.5 million unique visitors in January. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post is valued at $90 million, making it the second most valuable blog site.

Bloggers on the site range from Kat Aaron to Alan Zweibel. The Post get more than their fair share of celebrities, with Alex Baldwin, Mia Farrow, John Cusack, Bill Maher, and Huffington all regularly contributing to the site.

The blog gave Palermo an outlet for the frustration he was feeling during the dark days of the progressive movement in the George W. Bush administration.

“In 2005, when the Huffington started her blog, there was no reaching across the isle, there was one party controlling the presidency and both houses,” Palermo said.

Palermo’s progressive views go back to growing up on the streets of San Jose. He earned a bachelor’s degree from UC Santa Cruz (a hotbed of progressiveness in the 1980s) a master’s degree in history from San Jose State and a doctorate in American history from Cornell University in New York.

Palermo has authored two books, both related to Robert Kennedy: “Robert F. Kennedy and the Death of American Idealism” and “In His Own Right: The Political Odyssey of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.”

Palermo met the young Sen. Barack Obama thanks to his RFK scholarship. “Obama is a real RFK freak.” Obama attended a ceremony celebrating Kennedy’s 80th birthday in 2005 where Palermo spoke.

“I was blogging when I wrote my second RFK book and it really helped my writing,” Palermo said. “You just like, boom, there is no such thing as writers block.”

Now that Huffington Post is consequential, Palermo finds his postings are getting more attention.

“I have friends who ask, ‘Hey man, how do I get on there?'” he said. “I have no idea; it was a miracle how I got on there.”

“There are different ways to blog for us,” Huffington said in an interview with Spiegel Online International last year. “Some are well-known voices or good writers. Some people are important political players – like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Some are young and unknown, but we consider them interesting.”

Very few of the thousands of bloggers have posted blogs as consistently as Palermo. Starting from the very beginning of the site, he has posted close to a column a week.

His graduate students will occasionally bring up his blogging; it came up regularly during the 2008 presidential campaign. “A lot of my students were interested in Obama and the campaign, so I might have referred them to something I’ve written.”

Yousef Batarseh, graduate student of history, is taking a Palermo class for the third time. He regularly reads Palermo’s blogs.

“He tries to remind us history repeats itself,” he said. “That’s his main theme both in blogging and in the classroom.”

Aisha Rahimi, also a graduate student of history, is in her second class with Palermo as the instructor. She said Palermo doesn’t hide his social progressiveness, “I’d say 90 percent of social historians are liberal. Many of them agree with him so there isn’t a lot of contention.”

Palermo said he tries to keep his two outlets compartmentalized.

“Huffington Post is more like an outlet for free speech as a citizen-activist,” he said. “But I use my historical chops in those pieces. That is what separates me from many other bloggers and journalists.”

Dan King can be reached at [email protected]