Careers in History
"What can I do with a major in history?" What careers are open to me if I want to be a professional historian? The answer is that you can apply your history degree in a variety of workplaces and under a variety of job titles -- including educator, researcher, writer, editor, information manager, advocate, businessperson, or simply as a history professional.
The Skills of the Professional Historian
Historians possess a number of skills that help to define them as members of the profession. Fundamentally, historians attempt to answer important questions about past human activity and experience, to share the answers they discover, and to explain the relevance of those findings for the benefit of contemporary society.
The historical method -- a systematic approach to solving the problems of the past -- is central to the historian's skills. This process involves several key steps, the first of which is phrasing the questions or describing the problem in historical terms.
A museum curator asks not only, "What is this object, and of what material is it made?" but "When and where was it made? Who made it? How was it used? What other objects were associated with this one, or could be used for the same purpose? How important is this object, or others associated with it, as a record of values or relationships from the past? What can it tell us about a culture or a time different from our own? How is knowledge of that difference useful to us in the present?"
A consultant hired to write the celebratory centennial history of a religious congregation asks not only, "When was this church or synagogue founded and when was the building built?" but "Who built it? What motivated them to begin this institution? What were their initial goals and purposes? How did they organize to achieve them, and how have those goals and the organization changed over time? What obstacles and disagreements did they encounter, and how did they overcome or solve them? How was this church or synagogue or mosque part of a larger pattern of religious thought, organization, or development in its time and place?" A corporate historian asks not only, "Who founded this company, and what were its products or policies fifty years ago?" but "How was the organization structured in order to develop policies or products? To whom were these marketed and how successful was the campaign? Who were the company's principal competitors? How did it enter into competition against them? How have its successful products changed over time, and what technologies or decision-making processes were used to make those changes? What was the internal or external economic or political climate which enabled those changes to succeed, or caused them to fail?"
In answering such questions or solving specific historical problems, the second critical skill historians bring to the study of the past is the understanding that any historical problem or question has a larger context. Historians are concerned with two types of context. The historical context addresses how a particular event or issue from the past was part of a chain of events, or how it fit into a web of connected issues specific to the time or place under consideration. The historiographical context refers to the way earlier historians framed a problem or question about the past. History is produced by study and interpretation, so we can learn from the questions asked by our predecessors and by considering how the answers they provided shifted and changed over time.
As a result of their interest in other nations, peoples, cultures, and times, historians spend a considerable amount of time reading accounts of the past written by others. Often they come to be experts on the history of particular places and periods. As a result, all professional historians have learned how to use traditional information sources such as library reference tools and specialized bibliographies to search secondary sources -- the vast literature of monographs, journal articles, and technical reports. These tools allow them to identify sources that provide the basic contexts for a particular historical problem. Lately, historians are also using Internet sources and electronic databases. Their general and specific knowledge of the past gives them the critical skills to evaluate the usefulness and reliability of these sources, and to select those most relevant to the historical puzzle they are seeking to solve. However, most historical problems require more information than one can gain from existing historical studies.
Historians utilize a third general skill to move from framing the questions and contexts to identifying, finding, and using primary sources. These documents, or other materials produced by historical actors at the time in question, provide the raw materials that constitute the historical record. Guided by the questions posed and the contexts gathered from secondary sources, historians use their skills to select relevant information from an undifferentiated mass of primary source material and critically evaluate its reliability, accuracy, point of view, and possible connection to other information already gathered.
Traditionally, historians have been adept at the identification and use of written or textual primary sources, such as letters, diaries, government documents, and periodicals. They have learned how to use the complex tools or finding aids developed by librarians and archivists to locate the specific archival or manuscript collections whose undigested and often vast contents are most likely to have useful information relevant to the questions being raised. Increasingly, historians are able to integrate written sources with information from other types of primary historical sources. 'They can locate, read, and analyze appropriate visual materials (maps, paintings, engravings, and photographs), and they understand that landscapes and cityscapes are the result of human activity and thus have historical import. Historians can also evaluate material culture, whether it is of buildings and structures or of small objects such as household goods, medical instruments, or clothing, as historical evidence about human activity.
However, historians do not simply gather information and
evidence from the past. The fourth essential skill of a
professional historian is the ability to organize and
communicate their insights to others in a convincing and
accessible way. Some historians share research through
traditional written formats, such as books, articles,
reports, and essays that require competency in writing a
historical narrative or analysis. But for many other
historians, the final product might be quite different.
It might be the script for a film or video documentary,
the syllabus and assignments for a course, an oral
argument about the significance of a historic place, the
design for a museum exhibition, or a finding aid for a
complex collection of modern political papers. Into all
of these products, historians infuse their cumulative
understanding of historical contexts to the particular
information at hand to communicate answers to historical
questions.
Careers in Editing and Publishing
Careers in Historic Preservation
Careers Federal, State, & Local History
Careers Consulting & Contracting
Source: Careers for Students of History by the American Historical Association (2002)