Blog CCXIX (219): "The History Ph.D. as..." Series Revisited

"The History Ph.D. as...." series never died officially.  (In fact, you might see two new entries fairly soon.)  I just ran out of contacts and good ideas on how to structure some of the articles.  Other historians that blog, though, have been doing the same thing as me, and a couple of these essays are quite good.

The most commented on post in the eight year history of this blog was Blog XXXI: "The History Ph.D. as a Librarian."  Mark Danley, then of the University of Memphis and now at the U.S. Military Academy, wrote about the challenges and rewards of work in a library.  The blog of the American Historical Association has an article "A Historian in the Stacks: Finding a Professional Home in the Library" from Annie Johnson on much the same topic.  I like Danley's essay a lot, but Johnson, who works at Temple University, has written a pretty good essay as well.  Probably because she got her Ph.D. from USC. 

Two weeks before Danley wrote his post, Sarandis "Randy" Papadopoulos added to the same series with Blog XXIX (29): The History Ph.D. as a Government Historian: Still the “Improbable Success Story”?  Over at The Ohio State University, Mark Grimsley turned his blog over to a guest blogger, Frank Blazich, a colleague of Papadopoulos at the Naval History and Heritage Command.  Blazich's post "Beyond the Academic Cage: Observations of a New Federal Government Historian" discusses his experiences finding work outside of academia.

Geoffrey P. Megargee, a historian working at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, contributed to the series with "Blog XXXV (35): The History Ph.D. in the Museum."  Rachel Feinmark discusses her path to museum work and the role the Public Fellows Program of the American Council of Learned Societies played in that process with her article "Who’s Afraid of Being a Generalist? On Being a Historian outside the Academy," which appeared on the AHA's blog earlier this year.

Individuals interested in these topics should read the two "twined" essays.  I am both proud and grateful for the essays from Danley, Papadopoulos, and Megargee, but the postings from Johnson, Blazich, and Feinmark add to our understanding of how to make a career outside of a history department.

Blog CXC (190): The History Ph.D. as Archivist

Today's entry is the return (again) of "The History Ph.D. as..." series.  This entry comes from the blog of the U.S. National Archives.  On Wednesdays, the National Archives blog runs a feature called "What Are You Working On Wednesdays."  This feature profiles various individuals working for the National Achives.  This series is worth visiting, because NARA archivists do a lot of different work, come from a number of different academic fields, several have Ph.D.s, and are spread out all over the country. NARA might be a real option for the history Ph.D.

This profile is of Mitch Yockleson who holds a Ph.D. from the Royal Military College of Science, Cranfield University in the United Kingdom.  He is the author of Borrowed Soldiers, Americans Under British Command, 1918. (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008) and a biography of Douglas MacArthur and another on Ulysses S. Grant.  He also is an adjunct professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland and has his own web site. (The photo and youtube video below are from the original post on the NARA blog.)

What is your name and title?  
Mitch Yockelson, Investigative Archivist with the Archival Recovery Team. 

Yockelson at his desk in College Park, MD.  

Where is your job located?
Primarily at Archives II, but I do a lot of work at Archives I and even in the field at the presidential libraries and the regions as well. 

What is your job in a nutshell? 
I look into NARA’s lost or theft of historical items, things such as documents and artifacts from presidential libraries or regions.  This can include everything from films to acetate recordings, documents, photographs, anything that we hold that we know is missing.  They perhaps never came to the National Archives because some agency never gave it to us, or things that are reported as being stolen that we know we had. 

Its tough recognizing a document that we may not have realized was missing, but luckily with the government being the bureaucracy that it is, agencies usually marked most documents with some type of unique filing system.  For example, the War Department would register pretty much every document that came in up to a certain period and give it a unique marking that included the year.  So we can go and look at registers that will tell us that the document was indeed in the custody of the government, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us that NARA had it at some point.

We also do a lot of outreach for these items.  Besides having a Facebook page, and a Missing Documents page, we go to a lot of collector’s shows and set up tables with facsimiles of things we know have been taken, and we talk to the public and try to generate their help.  Mostly Civil War shows, we’ve been to Gettysburg, PA and Richmond, VA; we’ve even been to Tennessee and Ohio. 

(To view a transcript of the video, click here.) 

What are you working on right now? 
There are a lot of things we’re working on right now, the big one broke recently in the news.  One of the other things I’m working on right now is an Abraham Lincoln signed document.  It’s a neat document because it’s from the Civil War period, and shortly after the Battle of Antietam, and it’s the president trying to get an endorsement for a surgeon general to help with one of the Union Army hospitals that’s overwhelmed with casualties.  

What makes this interesting is that we have no proof that it actually came to NARA, but we do have the remainder of the files that are a part of the War Department records that are downtown in DC.  The document has file markings on it that match up to file markings for a collection of documents that we already have.  So we know that it was in the collection at one point, but we don’t know when it became alienated, which could have been as early as 1864.  We are trying to work to get this document back and marry it up with the rest of the records.  It could have been stolen; we don’t really know.  But we would like to get it back.

How long have you been at NARA?  Have you worked at any other NARA location? 
I’ve been with NARA since 1988 (22 years!), but I’ve only worked in the DC area at Archives I, Archives II and Suitland.  

What has changed since you started at NARA? 
I think the biggest frustration with my job is that we don’t have the subject area specialists that we used to.  NARA used to be more compartmentalized as far as our holdings went.  It was kind of like a university setting where if you wanted to do research in diplomatic records, you had a whole team of people where that’s all they did was diplomatic records.  Because of cutback and how we go about handling our records and how we reference them, we don’t have the subject are specialists anymore.  Sadly, this makes things difficult not only from a researcher’s aspect, but also from someone who looks into the investigations that needs the help of our subject area specialists who are now far and few between. 

Do you have a favorite day at NARA, or a favorite discovery or accomplishment? 
My favorite day was when I transferred from the reference branch and started working here in this new exciting world of investigative work.  That was coming up on my four year anniversary, in November of 2006. I’ve taken up golf in the past few years, and I love music; I have satellite radio, which I listen to all the time.  I also really just enjoy the passion of history: visiting historical places, traveling, and writing books and articles about history.  I’ve written a book about the First World War, which is based on my PhD. 

What is the last book you read, or the last book you loved?
The last book I finished was written by a guy named Robert Wittman, and it’s a memoir called Priceless.  The author worked for the FBI and recounts his work on finding stolen art and their related cases. 

One final note, the case that Yockelson referred to in this interview ended up with a retired NARA employee going to jail and got a lot of national media attention:

• CBS News article
• CNN article
• National Public Radio article
• The Washington Post article 1
• The Washington Post article 2

Blog CLXXIV (174): The History Ph.D. as a Lot More of Things

Over the past couple of years the American Historical Association has had a feature on its website called "AHA Member Spotlight."  These biographical profiles, offer short professional sketches of various historians.  After going through all of these postings I have come to the less than startling conclusion that most AHA members are primarily academics.  No big surprise there.  Every once in a while, though, there were some outliers.  Below are a series of links to the "Spotlight" of AHA members that are doing something that is a bit unique; that are teaching in departments other than history; that are working overseas; that teach in high schools; or those that are public historians of one sort or another. These features are highlighted here in the hopes that they might give the viewers of this blog unconventional ideas about future employment.  The "Spotlights" were not developed with that purpose in mind, but a highly creative mind can look at these features analytically and find new insights in them.  Enjoy:

• Peter Kizilos-Clift, independent scholar

• Blaine Brownell, academic administration, University of Alabama at Birmingham; University of North Texas; University of Memphis; Ball State University; University of South Florida

• Ellen Griffith Spears, New College/American Studies, University of Alabama

• Nancy McTygue, Executive Director, California History-Social Science Project, University of California, Davis

• William M. Ferraro, editor, Papers of George Washington 

• Carl Abbott, Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University

• David J. Trowbridge, Director, African and African American Studies, Marshall University

• Ronald J. Granieri, historian, Office of the Secretary of Defense

• Craig Perrier, high school social studies and history specialist, Fairfax County Public Schools

• Daniel Geary, Trinity College, University of Dublin

• Marty Blatt, Chief of Cultural Resources and Historian, Boston National Historical Park/Boston African American National Historic Site

• Amalia D. Kessler, Stanford Law School, Stanford University

• Colin F. Wilder, Associate Director, Center for Digital Humanities, University of South Carolina

• Michael Cullinane, Department of Humanities, Northumbria University 

• Beth Boland, historian, National Park Service

• Taylor Stoermer, historian, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

• Jeffrey S. Reznick, Chief, History of Medicine Division U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

Blog CLXXIII (173): The History Ph.D. as a Lot of Things

This post represents a return of the "History Ph.D. as ...." series (sort of).  The original series was a series of guest essays from individuals with a Ph.D. in history (with one or two notable exceptions) who found themselves working somewhere other than in a history department.  Starting in 2013 the American Historical Association's newsletter Perspectives on History began a similar series called "Career Paths."  In running this blog I have always preferred to avoid articles from other media outlets that were widely available elsewhere.  When I have reproduced stories, I have tried to do so from outlets that most of the readers of this blog would not regularly consult.   While Perspectives is clearly a publication that many readers of this blog read regularly, there are a number of articles in it that are similar to the "History Ph.D. as ..." series and since there are so many accounts that can be consulted quickly I am presenting links to these first-person accounts here:

• Think Tank: Ted Bromund, “From Academia to a Think Tank: Reflections on How to Be Lucky”

• Non-profit: Robert Oxnam, “Launching Pad-PhD, Target-TBD”

• Academic Administration: Lauren Apter Bairnsfather, "What I Learned at AHA 2014: A Mentor's Perspective"

• Government Service/Novelist: Clifford Adelman, "The Edges of History"

• Business Consulting: Joshua Wolff, "A New Course: Converting a Passion for History into a Private Sector Career"

• Academic Administration: Lauren Apter Bairnsfather, Pam Lach, Jason Myers, and Anne Mitchell Whisnant, "In Admin: Four History PhDs Discuss their Alt-­Ac Careers"

• Congressional Staff: John A. Lawrence, "A Historian on the Hill"

Blog CLX (160): The History Ph.D. as Businessman

Today's posting represents the return of the "History Ph.D. as..." series.  This interview with Chris McNickle, a University of Chicago  history Ph.D., was originally published on page 23 of the November-December issue of The University of Chicago Magazine with the title of "Past is Prologue."   The author of the interview was Laura Demanski.

McNickle is the global head of institutional business for Fidelity Worldwide Investment, a position he took in 2011.  Prior to this job, he worked for the consulting firm Greenwich Associates. He is also the author of two books on New York urban history: New York City: To Be Mayor of New York: Ethnic Politics in the City (1993) and The Power of the Mayor: David Dinkins, 1990–1993 (2012). Here is the interview:

How did you end up at the University of Chicago?
I developed an interest in history, New York City history in particular. I discovered a biography of Fiorello LaGuardia that had been written by Arthur Mann. I thought it was a great biography and wanted to go study with him.

What was your dissertation about?
It looks at the electoral history of NYC mayors in the late 19th and the 20th century as a series of ethnic successions where different ethnic groups play the most dominant role in the city’s politics at different times. What’s interesting about New York is that no one ethnic group has ever been able to dominate so entirely that it could win citywide office without creating coalitions. The dissertation was published as a book. I was very proud of it.

What drew you to study history?
I never really contemplated an academic career. After college I went into international banking for about five years. Then one of the periodical Latin American debt crises occurred, and it was clear it was going to be some time before there was a lot of activity again. I had discovered traveling to Latin America that those countries that had been discovered by a European power about the same time as the United States had many superficial similarities, but worked very differently than the United States, and that intrigued me. Also, when I traveled to Philadelphia from New York to attend the University of Pennsylvania—leaving one large American city for a second one—I had expected things to be more or less the same, but they turned out to be more different than similar. Those two comparative experiences caused me to want to understand these differences.

How does your history training help you in your work at Fidelity?
I think any graduate program that is demanding and helps people to solve problems in a structured manner offers a set of disciplines that ought to be helpful in making business decisions. In the case of a historian, we are trained to make connections across time and across different dimensions of human behavior. We are taught great respect for marshaling evidence to make a case. We’re taught that people have an easier time understanding complex events when they are wrapped around a story, particularly when they’re supported and the logic is clear. All of those tools are very helpful in business decision making.

Do you have advice for graduate students who want to go into business?
I would encourage them to recognize that they have a range of skills that, if they have been successful history students, any employer would want to have. It’s less about the historical knowledge itself than things like intellectual curiosity, a desire to understand how things happen, a need to know the facts and document them rigorously—all of those are qualities that employers seek.

How do you spend your spare time?
Reading history, writing history.

Does the history you read inform your work?
Yes, in some ways it’s simply a matter of intellectual interest, but in other ways it does help clarify the situation. So look at European history since World War II. The European project, as it’s often referred to, is all about the politics of trying to create enough connections and coherence across Europe that violent conflict would no longer be deemed sensible. That’s been a very keen part of why Germany and France have been such strong proponents of bringing the Euro Zone together. As a matter of pure economics one can imagine certain solutions that as a matter of political decision making simply are not acceptable to the major countries of Europe.

Are you writing something now?
I’m working on a history of Mayor Bloomberg’s term in office. I’ve just begun that.

Is it more challenging to write with less hindsight?
There isn’t as much historical distance, yet at the same time the information and research that I need are dramatically more accessible through websites now. There may be a moment where I do realize that I don’t have as much historical perspective as one will have over time. But I think that there’s a real benefit to writing the history of important events shortly after they happen, when memories are fresh.

Blog CLIII (153): Alternative Careers and the AHA

There are growing signs that the American Historical Association is taking some real steps to address the biggest issue facing the profession--the job crisis.  Starting in September, Perspectives on History, the AHA newsletter, has been running columns from history Ph.D.s who have found employment outside of a history department.  The first article, "A Historian on the Hill" came from John A. Lawrence, who served for 38 years as a staff member in the U.S. House of Representatives after attending the Berkley campus of the University of California.  In the October issue, Camille Henderson, a University of Chicago Ph.D., wrote about her work as the head of the Agios Pharmaceuticals, a firm located in Cambridge, Massachusetts in "Study Change to Affect Chang: A History Ph.D. in Human Resources."  The November issue presented a discussion between four historians who are academic administrators.  They are Lauren Apter Bairnsfather, an institutional research analyst for the University of Texas; Pam Lach, a Digital Innovation Lab manager at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Jason Myers, a faculty and staff support specialist and operations coordinator for the University of Denver; and Anne Mitchell Whisnant, a deputy secretary of the faculty and also adjunct associate professor of history and American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

This feature in Perspectives is a good step.  The AHA newsletter has a bigger audience than this blog and these articles basically perform the same function as the "History Ph.D. as..." series that appeared in this blog.  It is my sincere hope that more initiatives from the AHA will follow.

Blog CIV (104): The History Ph.D. as Novelist

Editorial Note: Today's posting is the third part of three essays that represents a return of the "The History Ph.D. as..." series. This article examines historians who have moved into the world of fiction as novelists. The article is exceptionally long even by internet standards (roughly 4,000 words), so it will be posted on "In the Service of Clio" in three parts. Part one appeared in Blog CII on Monday, November 28, 2011 and part two appeared in Blog CIII on Wednesday, November 30, 2011.

Having a Ph.D. can also be an unusual asset for a novelist. In 1997, Paretsky was a visiting scholar in Oxford and visited the Imperial War Museum, which she called an “incredible archive of everything about the war.” She decided to write a V. I. Warshawski novel that would “bring past and present together” in a novel about the recovery of Holocaust assets issue like dormant insurance policies and bank accounts.

This little story raises an important question: can a historian return to history after writing fiction, be it contemporary or historical in nature?  David believes so. “I had no worries, and quickly rattled off the first three chapters of my much-delayed history of the British soldier.” In that vein, Jill Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ‘41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, co-wrote a novel Blindspot (2008) with Jane Kamensky, another historian, and found that fiction writing actually helped her in doing history. “What it turned into—and this is the thing that most surprised me—is that it fed back into my work as an historian,” she explained. “I'm working on Benjamin Franklin now, writing a biography of Franklin and his sister; I feel very close to both of them, as a nonfiction writer, in a way that I don't think I would have felt if we hadn't written this novel.”

How does one become a novelist? What are the detailed steps of publishing in a new venue? The first thing is to have a literary agent. An important note is that agents specialize: some do history, some do romance fiction, some do science fiction, and so on. Make sure you do research and approach the right individual for what you want to write. How? There are plenty of books on publishing and literary agents that you can find in the self-help section of any decent sized bookstore. There are many writers conferences that you can attend, and many feature sessions that give you face-to-face time with agents. This type of personal connection, like in many other fields, helps. Agents are swamped with proposals from aspiring writers and while we would like to think that our writing will sell itself, Tillman observed: “The world isn’t spun that way.”

Some creative writing classes might also be in order. Many schools have MFA programs in creative writing. Enrolling in a degree program is probably not necessary, but many do offer courses that will cover important topics that will be new to the historian such as character development and dramatic structure. Many agents require that first time novelists have a completed manuscript, so the exact sequence in which you go about this task might vary.

Sometimes getting an agent is a difficult thing in and of itself. Cobbs Hoffman methodically researched the agents she contacted and collected many rejections before finding representation. Even then, she had to go through two agents before she found one that successfully sold her book to a major publisher. “You do not necessarily benefit from being represented by a major, major agency.”

Another factor to consider in deciding upon this career path is that publishing is suffering in the national economy, just like most other businesses. Until recently, the publishing industry was always considered a recession proof entertainment medium. Books sold well regardless of the ups and downs in the economy, but the growth of personal, electronic media means now that there are other significant venues for the spending of discretionary income. In the last few years, publishers have been laying off editors and bookstores have been going out of business. Many houses are reluctant to sign new authors even if they have a proven track record publishing in another genre.

The implication is that authors have to be their own marketing machines. The publishers just are not going to be doing the same amount of work that they once did. This implication is more important for novelists than historians. “I learned early on,” Tillman explained, “that bestsellers are not written, they are sold.” Novelists have to be prepared to be on-line, visiting the blogs, using social media websites in addition to doing author events. “It’s more important than ever that authors get heavily involved in marketing their own books,” he added.

Some authors have chosen to go the self-publishing route. Cobbs Hoffman after having two agents tell her they could not sell her novel, decided on this venue, because she had to “do something other than press delete” with her manuscript. Keep in mind, she is an accomplished historian, winning the Allen Nevis Prize for her first book The Rich Neighbor Policy: Rockefeller and Kaiser in Brazil (1992). Carpenter also made that decision after playing with his Antimony manuscript off and on for twenty years: “It’s a way to get your product out there and get it noticed.” Most of the firms that produce self-published books are basically fee driven publishing houses and an author can choose from a number of available services, ranging from editing to marketing. These have additional costs and an author will still have to do a good deal of work in selling the book, finding reviewers, getting promotional blurbs from others, and submitting the book for awards. The problem is, as Carpenter admits, is that 99 percent of self-published work is “junk.”

Why then, would anyone go this route? “You are looking for that John Grisham effect,” Carpenter explained. If an author has something in print, it is easier to start conversations with publishers and agents about transferring to a bigger press. This process happened to Cobbs Hoffman. A major publisher picked up her book after it garnered critical praise and won some book prizes. She admits this would never have happened if she had not self-published the book: “I know for a fact that Random House would never seen it.”

Since this blog is about giving career advice to the new Ph.D., it is important to ask if being a novelist is a legitimate alternative career open to the history Ph.D.? That answer to that question is a complicated one. One of the hard facts about writing—regardless of its genre—is that it is difficult to making a steady living wage at it. Most book authors have some other job: journalist, academic, etcetera. Novelists are no different. A first time author might sell only 5,000 copies, which is better than your average academic monograph, but not that much better. It often takes several tries before a novelist has a commercially successful work. This is the “John Grisham effect” that Carpenter mentioned. It took two tries for Grisham, the author of legal thrillers, to become a best-seller. When The Firm (1991) started selling well, only then did A Time to Kill (1989) become popular. Michael Connelly, the mystery writer, did not become a best-seller until his fifth book The Poet (1996) appeared in print.

Most of the historians mentioned in this article have tenure-track positions and have turned to fiction as a sidelight to an academic career rather than as a substitute for one. In this case, Paretsky is the exception. She turned to fiction on a full-time basis. Even then, there are important qualifications in her story. Married to a University of Chicago physics professor, she knew she would not be able to find a history job in the Chicago area and went to business school, earning a MBA. She then worked at an insurance agency. “Insurance isn't anyone’s first choice for a career,” she remarked. She stayed there until she had three novels to her name. It was the $200,000 she received for selling the film rights to her V. I. Warshawski character that made it possible for her to leave the insurance company and focus on her writing. “It was foolish because I lost control of the character,” she says. “It was smart because it gave me the freedom to quit my job and become a full-time writer."

Connelly has made similar remarks about the financial windfall he received from selling the film rights to his books. Two of his books Bloodwork (1998) and The Lincoln Lawyer (2005) were turned into films of the same names. Those developments, however, came later in his writing career. He was a working journalist while writing his first four novels. “I sold Paramount the rights to Harry Bosch 18 years ago. I don't regret it. The deal I made allowed me to quit my job at the L.A. Times and be a full-time writer. But they never made a movie. We tried very hard. There were maybe six different scripts, but they just weren't Harry Bosch. So they put him on the shelf.”

Blog CIII (103): The History Ph.D. as Novelist

Editorial Note: Today's posting is the second part of three that represents a return of the "The History Ph.D. as..." series. This essay examines historians who have moved into the world of fiction as novelists. The article is exceptionally long even by internet standards (roughly 4,000 words), so it will be posted on "In the Service of Clio" in three parts. Part one appeared in Blog CII on Monday, November 28, 2011 and part three will be out on Friday, December 2, 2011.

There are bigger concerns such as how well does a historian write fiction? “With difficulty,” Ian Mortimer, observed. Mortimer, who writes fiction under the pen name James Forrester, added, “Anyone with a PhD in history has spent at least seven years being told by university lecturers always to ‘err on the side of caution’ and to suspect all evidence for the past—to the extent that many academic books are more concerned with what we do not know than what we do. The idea of deliberately creating scenarios, events and characters that did not exist in reality is anathema. However, the biggest hurdle a historian has is persuading people that he or she can write a novel."
 
Mortimer notes correctly that there are good reasons for this skepticism. “Historians are mostly very poor writers. Nothing in a university education teaches us how to write history well, let alone do anything more imaginative. Most historians baulk at the thought because there is nothing firm for them to hold on to, nothing certain and therefore nothing indisputably true. We have to make a huge leap of faith to realise the ‘truth’ that makes historical fiction worthwhile is a deeper, more subtle truth than in history, concerned with the truths of life experience, not facts?”

Cobbs Hoffman agreed. “It’s very different,” she said. “You have to write better.” That requires more time to hone and polish prose. “You have to work harder at it.”

What issues does a writer face in trying to transition from one medium to the other? “Writing fiction was far harder than I could have imagined,” David stated, “and there were moments during the long and torturous edit process when it seemed that Zulu Hart, the first of the trilogy, would never be fit for public consumption.”

His editors told him to back away from historical, facts and narrative. That is a difficult thing for a historian to do. “Eventually I saw the sense of this. I wasn't being asked to sacrifice historical accuracy per se. Just to accept that a historical novel, or any novel for that matter, stands or falls on plot and characterisation; period detail is important, but only in so far as it gives a sense of authenticity. It must remain in the background and never be allowed to dominate the story.”

Does historical fiction do damage to our understanding of the past? That is a real issue that historians writing fiction must consider. “Historical fiction, as a result, often takes liberties with the ‘truth’: it compresses time, invents conversations and motives that real people never had, and generally tampers with the historical record for the purposes of plot.”

The real issue is how much. “The trick is to minimize those liberties, and to make sure that when you're writing about historical figures you “stay true to the spirit of that person,” George MacDonald Fraser, the novelist best known for his Flashman novels, reflected. Fraser is something of the reverse of most of the authors discussed here; he was a novelist/screenwriter who also did history.

The biggest issue in taking dramatic license is the use of fictional characters. Weir, for her part, wants to use her fiction to fill in gaps in the historical record and gain “insights that would not be permissible to a historian, and yet can have a legitimate value of their own.” As a result, she prefers to use real individuals as her main characters. “While I was researching my biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine,” she explained, “it occurred to me that I wanted to write a novel about Eleanor, in which I could develop ideas and themes that had no place in a history book, but which—based on sound research and educated guesses—could help to illuminate her life and explain her motives and actions.”

Martin agrees that historical fiction “fills in the spaces.” He disagrees, though, on the use of fictional characters. “Fictional characters have a freedom of movement in the story that gives you a freedom of movement.” If an author does not use fictional characters in a novel, then they might as well be writing history. “The fictional characters give me the plot,” he said. “That is what makes fiction, what happens to characters who move through history.”

At the same time, this fictionalizing of a real person’s life must be grounded in reality. “It is liberating to be able to use one’s imagination, but you can't simply indulge in flights of fancy,” Weir explained. “That sells short both those who know nothing of the subject, and those who know a great deal. I know—because my readers regularly, and forcefully, tell me so—that people care that the historical fiction they read is close to the truth.”

With these considerations in mind, an author still needs to do research to tell your story and get it right. “The research is the necessary spadework. Even when I was working on my doctorate I was writing poetry, the occasional magazine article. I'm more of a magpie researcher than someone who wants to live in it all the time,” Doig explained.

The knowledge a historian has of the past can be a useful in tool writing historical fiction. “Yet much of the research required for a historical novel is, I discovered, very different from that done for a history book,” David observed. “For Zulu Hart I already knew a lot of solid factual information because I'd previously written a history of the Zulu War. What I didn't have was the sights and smells. What, for example, did the inside of the War Office look like in 1879? Or what was the experience of steam travel from England to South Africa at that time?”

Harkness agrees: “As a historian you can only go as far as the evidence will take you. I needed to be able to shed that, to let the history serve the story rather than have the history bind the story. You have to rewire your brain, in a way.” She, however, chose to use her knowledge of the past to examine how it affects the present. At the center of her story is Ashmole 782, a long lost medieval document that may or may not contain the secrets of eternal life. “It really exists,” she said. The document was one of many manuscripts that Elias Ashmole, a 17th century bibliophile, collected and cataloged. “It really is lost—I've looked for it; that's its real title. This is the perfect jumping-off point for a novel. I can either be frustrated as a historian or intrigued as a storyteller.”

Blog CII (102): The History Ph.D. as Novelist

Editorial Note: Today's posting is the first part of three essays that represents a return of the "The History Ph.D. as..." series. This essay examines historians who have moved into the world of fiction as novelists.  The article is exceptionally long even by internet standards (roughly 4,000 words), so it will be posted on "In the Service of Clio" in three parts.  Part two appeared in Blog CIII on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 and part three will be out on Friday, December 2, 2011. 

Writing and research abilities are two skills that a historian acquires in the process of getting a Ph.D. Both of these abilities can be transferred to the work of writing fiction. Believe it or not there is a long tradition of historians and other scholars writing novels instead of or in addition to scholarly studies. “English-speaking anthropologists have been writing fiction ever since anthropology began in the late 19th century,” Nancy Schmidt, an anthropologist and head of Harvard's Tozzer Library, remarked.

Historical fiction has also enjoyed recent popularity in the publishing world. Ivan Doig, who earned a Ph.D. in western history from the University of Washington and has published academically, has made more of a name for himself as a novelist, was asked about historical fiction: “I hope it's a great wave I'm caught up in. I don't think of myself as a writer of historical fiction. There are historical laws of gravity in historical fiction; big things are happening in the world, and my characters are affected by those."

Why is historical fiction currently so popular? Saul David, a British military historian and a professor at the University of Buckingham turned novelist, attributes the popularity of historians writing fiction to the success of another British historian, Alison Weir. Already one of the best selling historians in the United Kingdom, Weir’s historical novel, Innocent Traitor (2006), which is about Lady Jane Grey, became a best seller. Despite her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, Philippa Gregory is an established novelist of the Tudor and Stuart periods. She believes her readers don’t read novels such as The White Queen (2009) “as history.” Instead she believes they consider it a work about “a woman speaking from the urgency of the novel.” According to historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, who has also written a novel Sashenka (2008), “Real stories—whether in pure fiction or historical—have a certain indefinable power; we are endlessly curious about the past and hungry for learning that we hope will illuminate the present.” Journalist turned historian turned novelist Barrett Tillman put it simply when he said, “History drives the story."

Other historians agree with this assessment. “I learned history through historical novels,” Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, the Dwight Stanford Professor at San Diego State University, said. A historian, she is also the author of a novel, Broken Promises (2011) about the U.S. Civil War, Works of fiction are what first got her interested in becoming a historian. David had a similar experience. He was in his early teens “when I read my first Flashman novel and it's no coincidence that most of my history books are about the same Victorian wars."

Why do historians turn to fiction? “Every historian is a romantic,” Stan Carpenter, a history Ph.D. teaching at the U.S. Naval War College as a professor of strategy, remarked. Carpenter is also the author of Resurrection of Antimony (2009), a historical novel set in World War II. “Every historian has thought about living in the time period they studied. Writing novels “allows you to roam in that sphere of our own historical fantasy.” William Martin, the novelist, agrees: “I liked living in those worlds myself.”

There is also a good deal of overlap between historian and novelist. “The greatest historians working today—as has always been the case—are the ones that tell you a story,” Martin explained. He is the reverse of Cobbs Hoffman. He learned history as a work-study student at Harvard, assisting visiting scholars associated with the history department. In addition to being a novelist who has written mystery novels and historical fiction, he wrote the screenplay for the documentary George Washington: The Man Who Wouldn't Be King, which was an episode in the PBS series “The American Experience.” Work on this documentary eventually lead to his novel Citizen Washington. Deborah Harkness, an associate professor of history of science at the University of Southern California, who has also written a novel, A Discovery of Witches (2011), set in contemporary England with witches, vampires, and demons, agrees. “I'm a storyteller,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “And I have really good material to work with: I've been studying magic and the occult since about 1983.”

British historian and novelist Jason Goodwin had a different reaction to fiction. “When I went to Long Kesh [a prison in Northern Ireland where he was incarcerated], I was persuaded to stop reading fiction by a friend who dismissed it all as sort of bourgeois nonsense. For 10 years I didn't go near fiction. I just concentrated on history and politics. When I was finishing my Ph.D., I started to read fiction again. It was like falling in love again. A very intense experience."

There are skeptics, though. The British historian Tristram Hunt, who teaches at Queen Mary, University of London and is a Member of Parliament, told The Times that he had a number of colleagues who had taken up fiction because it sold comparatively well. “There is a dangerous tendency among historians to slide into historical fiction, which must be avoided at all costs,” he said.

Hunt has a point. His worry is one that stems from the concern that many historians had a few years back about literary theorists who argued that history is a construction, that history is nothing more than a story that individuals tell about the past. This idea, although silly when considered in full, attacked the very foundation of history, and its integrity as a discipline. If history is nothing more than another form of fiction, why bother? In 1990 Sir Geoffrey Elton described postmodern literary theory as “the intellectual equivalent of crack.” The following year, historian Gordon Wood warned that historians might soon “put themselves out of business” if they went down this path. In 2005 Donald Kagan, in his Jefferson lecture, “In Defense of History,” warned about the perils of “pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo.” The British historian of early modern Britain, Lawrence Stone dismissed the literary theorists, noting, “The novelist is free to create events. Imagination does play a very important part in the writing of history but there is a reality principle out there."

These concerns are ones that individual historian need to consider when writing historical fiction. Writers, be they historians or novelists, develop something of a name brand. Sara Paretsky, a University of Chicago Ph.D., solved this problem by writing in a venue that has nothing to do with the field of antebellum New England. She has written a series of mystery novels set in contemporary Chicago featuring her main character, V. I. Warshawski.

For most historians turned novelists, this issue appears to be a small one. Cobbs Hoffman rejected the idea of using a pen name when she wrote Broken Promises (2011). She figured that she might “gain some capital” with her readers as a historian. Tillman took the same view. He already had a name from non-fiction books he had written and that was a major asset in selling books.

Blog LIV (54): The History Ph.D. as Journalist

Another career path open for the history Ph.D. is to go into journalism. Given major transitions within this profession, though, this is career path is one that a historian should make with a good understanding of its limitations.

First things first, history and journalism are professions that are quite similar in many ways. If a history Ph.D. is looking for a job outside of academia, journalism would be a nice fit. With that point made, journalism is a profession that is in major turmoil and transition at the moment, which is a consideration that anyone must take into consideration when making their career plans.

The similarities between journalism and history and significant. Both basically are doing the same thing: communicating information and explaining what happened. “Good journalists have a drive to seek the truth without bias,” Steve Komarow, deputy chief of the Associated Press bureau in Washington, D.C., stated.

The two fields basically require practitioners to research and then communicate their findings in writing. “Ultimately journalism is all about writing,” Jamie McIntyre, formerly a reporter with the Cable News Network and now an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, explained. Business Week editor-in-chief Stephen Adler, observed that few journalists working for magazines write well, so his advice is that reporters really work at honing that skill. Editing resources are shrinking and a reporter that needs little revision will have an advantage over others.

Do you need to major in journalism to become a reporter? The short answer is no. A number of reporters have made this point. “It’s not necessarily appropriate,” Siva Vaidhyanathan, a former reporter for the Austin American-Statesman and now a professor of cultural history and media studies at the University of Virginia, said. Vaidhyanathan was a history major as an undergraduate before earning a Ph.D. in American Studies. “Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school,” Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker, remarked. “If I was studying today, I would go get a master's in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that's the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.”

Can a history Ph.D. be a journalist? The short answer is yes. The James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research at the University of Georgia has conducted a number of surveys on the hiring practice of media outlets. Print news organizations show a healthy willingness to hire people from other professions. The numbers vary from year to year, but on a percentage basis, the figure is in the high teens. (The figures are lower in broadcast journalism).

The skills that a history Ph.D. has are useful for a career in journalism. These include research, foreign language, writing, subject matter expertise, critical inquiry, storytelling, and analysis. David Nather, formerly a reporter with The Dallas Morning News and Congressional Quarterly was a history major at the University of Texas. He called history and journalism “complimentary or adjacent fields.” Good historical understanding adds depth of understanding to a story and allows the journalist to see parallels. So, for example, a legal historian, might be very good at covering the courthouse beat, a military historian might do well as a defense correspondent, and so on.

That is the good news; the bad news is that the Ph.D. itself is not an asset. “No one ever asks if you have an advanced degree,” McIntyre observed.

Finally, becoming a journalist does not mean the end to a career in history, or even as a scholar. Many journalists write books. In fact, many media outlets have sabbatical policies for their reporters that are working on a book. There are many, many universities, foundations, and think tanks that have fellowship programs for journalists. Having a degree in history and working experience as a reporter would expand the number of academic jobs one could apply for if an individual wanted to return to college teaching. Having been a working reporter or editor is often one of the main criteria for employment at journalism school.

While the skill sets of the historian and the journalist are similar, both professions are facing serious professional problems. Journalism is “undergoing incredible seismic change,” John D’Anna, a reporter for The Arizona Republic and an adjunct professor of journalism at Arizona State University, said.

Two major social phenomenon account for the problems facing the profession at the moment. The first was the rise of the internet and the other new communication technologies. The power and potential of this new medium caught journalism off guard, challenging a business model where the major revenue stream was from advertising. Many publications gave their content away for free while at the same time failing to understand the power and reach of the internet. Many websites—even those that one might not think of as competing with news organizations, Facebook and MySpace come to mind—derive their principle source of income from advertising, increasing competition for a revenue stream that had not increased in size.

The second phenomenon was the downturn in the economy. The biggest source of revenue for news organizations is advertising. In any downturn in the economy, advertising is one of the first things that businesses cut.

Either change would have been tough to handle. The combination has been devastating. Some publications, like the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, have gone out of business. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ended its print operations and is now available only on-line. Many media corporations like the Tribune Company have filed for bankruptcy. There have also been massive layoffs—generally of senior, more expensive journalists—in the industry. There is even a website Paper Cuts documenting layoffs, and this phenomenon served as the backdrop to novelist Michael Connelly’s recent book The Scarecrow (2009).

As a result, journalism can be very rough for someone wanting to make their living as a reporter. The average starting salaries in journalism are $30,000, which is less than that of an average new assistant professor of history. The important thing to remember is that most of these jobs are advertising for someone with a bachelor’s degree and not a Ph.D. Although the labor market is depressed, the situation is “not hopeless at all,” according to Nather. D’Anna notes that he is still encouraging people to enter the profession because there is still a market for the reporter. Nather explained, “It’s pretty bad, but if your young and just starting out, there’s still hope.” He also added, “There are other kinds of journalism jobs that are opening in non-traditional outlets.”

What do those facts mean for the history Ph.D.? Well, first they have to be creative in looking for employment opportunities. They might need to consider working for media outlets that are primarily based on the internet. Second, journalism appears to best treated as an early career option. Being a reporter is a good activity for ten years or so, but individuals working in the field need to be developing another career path. For a historian with a Ph.D., the obvious path is to return to return to academia. As a result, the historian should be working to get their academic work accepted for publication during this time, which will make them viable candidates for jobs among the professoriate.

With those points made the crisis in journalism could easily end in a short while. “I’m just waiting for the pendulum to swing back the other way,” Kimberly Dozier of the Associated Press remarked. Once the economy becomes stronger, advertising revenue will increase. More importantly, it will be easier to plot a career as a journalist once the new media formats stabilize and the leaders of media companies understand how to use them to turn a profit. For example, the trend right now is towards specialization and narrow, niche markets. This tendency runs counter toward the general effort of most media companies in the twentieth century of reaching as big an audience as possible. Blogs were all the rage four years ago, but they seem to be on the decline now. While there might be an audience for a blog about education policy and politics in Wisconsin, the ability of individual bloggers to make their enterprise economic sustainable seems suspect. The quality of that effort is equally questionable. Reporters have repeatedly noted that individual efforts do not produce the same quality product as that which comes from bigger news agencies.

So, how do you go about getting a job in this field. Having a portfolio of your work is important. “Any place you can get published of any kind will help you,” Nather observed.

With that point made, academic publications are not going to be particularly useful. A good rule of thumb is you have to be published in the media format in which you wish to work. If you want to be a print journalist, you need to have a collection of newspaper, magazine and web site clippings to your name. If you want to be a broadcast journalist, you need a collection of your stories on a DVD.

The historian also must develop certain abilities that are not encouraged in graduate school. “The best and worst journalism skill—both—is being a quick learner,” Vaidhyanathan said. Journalists need to challenge cursory judgments but know when to accept easy answers and when not to. Hitting that balance is difficult. Historians, Vaidhyanathan explains, are good at rejecting quick assessments, but in compensation they are “too much like Hamlet.” He means they are narrow, not bold and “wishy-washy.” He also notes that reporters need to be interesting and fast. Basically, a reporter must know how to catch his readers attention and how to produce on deadline.

Adapting to this different environment might be a challenge for the history Ph.D, but all journalists are adapting at this moment. McIntyre notes that a major trend in the profession is that “everybody does everything.” There will no longer be reporters who only work in television or those that only work in newspapers, and those that work in television need to be prepared to do camera and editing work in addition to being on the air. “You have to be really good at a lot of things and excellent at something,” McIntyre added. Since blogs allow people to use various media formats in combination, this is a format all journalists need to learn. “If you want to be a journalist, you ought to be blogging,” he explained. He said a blog is now a reporter’s “calling card.”

Dozier of the Associated Press agrees. She came to national attention as a reporter for CBS News after an early career in print and radio. “I was an unlikely television correspondent in 2003.” She went into television because it had resources that other news agencies did not have available. After writing a book about her experiences in Iraq, she recently left CBS to write on the intelligence community for AP. Her advice to new journalists: “learn all the mediums.”

It is fairly easy for historians to go about acquiring the needed clippings and sample stories needed to seek employment in journalism. School newspapers, magazines, and stations (radio and television) offer good places to begin. Many news organizations offer summer internships. Having a summer internship has often been a critical component in professionally advancement as a journalists. These positions are usually designed for advanced undergraduates, but grad students will have an advantage in maturity and experience. As media outlets downsize, they are depending more and more on interns to make up the difference. The quality of reporting is not necessarily as good as what the reader would get from an experienced report, but these programs allow rookies to get more experience sooner than they would have under other circumstances. Since most history graduate programs have little for their students to do in the summer, an internship would fit in nice into their academic schedules. College placement offices are good places to start looking for internship announcements.

Another thing worth noting is that just as there are many different types of specializations in history, so there are in journalism. Many of these groups are similar to fields of historical inquiry. A military historian will be happy to learn that there is an association of military journalists. If a career in journalism seems like a possibility, it might be wise to consider joining one of the many professional organizations that exist to get a feel for the profession and issues of concern in the field, since those concerns are different from those of historians. Organizations with websites include: Military Reporters and Editors: The Association of Military Journalists, Association of Food Journalists, Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, National Society of Newspaper Columnists, Criminal Justice Journalists, Football Writers Association of America, Garden Writers Association, International Food Wine & Travel Writers Association, National College Baseball Writers Association, and the U.S. Basketball Writers Association.

There are three publications worth consulting to get a feel for the profession. They are: Columbia Journalism Review, American Journalism Review, and Editor & Publisher.

So, if you are interested in a job in journalism, where do you go to look for a job? The good news is that there are many places. College placement offices are good places to start. Editor & Publisher has a job listings section. Many professional organizations have job listings. Some, though, require membership to access this section of their websites. The biggest one is Sigma Delta Chi: The Society of Professional Journalists. Others include: the Association for Alternative Newsweeklies, National Education Writers Association, the Association of Health Care Journalists, National Association of Science Writers, National Conference of Editorial Writers, North American Agricultural Journalists, Society of American Business Editors and Writers, Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Religion Newswriters Association.

There are several useful websites that list jobs available in journalism: http://www.sportsjournalists.com/ is as its name implies all about sports reporting. The http://www.journalismjobs.com/ web site has listings for all types of media. The http://www.amfmjobs.com/ website is about work in radio and http://www.tvjobs.com/ is a site listing employment opportunities in television broadcasting.

The Poytner Institute is basically a journalism think tank, but it has also a section on its website showing available jobs and another listing people looking for employment. The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is an association of journalism faculty.

Some of the bigger media corporations and new services have sections on their web sites listing jobs. These include the Associated Press, Gannett, Cox, the Tribune Company and The Washington Post Company.

Blog XLVII (47): The History Ph.D. at a Foreign University

An option that many scholars looking for employment fail to consider is going overseas. As with any profession, there are advantages and disadvantages to this career path. The essay that follows is based on my own experiences living in Korea and the United Kingdom, and interviewing a number of expatriate professors.

One of the great advantages to teaching oversees is the opportunity it offers to learn about different cultures and gain new perspectives. This response is one most American academics make when explaining about the advantages about working oversees. When asked what was the best thing about working abroad, Barbara Keyes, an American teaching at the University of Melbourne in Australia, replied, “As a scholar of foreign relations, I find it fascinating now to be a participant in foreign relations, and to be learning in depth about how non-Americans view the United States.”

Another reason for teaching oversees is that there is a good deal more prestige to being a professor in foreign cultures than there is in the United States. “One nice thing about being in a small pond is you get to brief ambassadors, get phone calls from TV and radio frequently,” Keyes observed.

There are also professional rewards to living overseas. “The academic world in the UK is much more densely populated than anywhere in North America, with the possible exception of the Boston-NY-DC corridor. There are more universities and therefore more conferences/seminars etc., in a relatively small area, and it is therefore much easier to attend them,” Nik Gardner, a Canadian who taught at the University of Salford in England, explained.

Dan Kowalsky has taught at Washington University in St Louis, The American University in Cairo and the University of Bristol before taking his current position as a Lecturer in Modern European History at Queens University Belfast. He voiced views similar to those of Gardner and has found it easier to do European history while living in Europe. “I've also been able to collaborate with scholars in Ireland, England, France, Spain, Germany and Russia, which has greatly broadened my horizons personally and professionally. As a historian, I really love being in old Europe. My current house is older than the United States! It is thrilling for me to be a part of this wonderful, terrible tapestry that is Europe's past and present.”

While being abroad can be enriching professionally, there are significant social challenges to living overseas. “The absence of others with similar cultural reference points (pop culture, sports etc) can make it a bit lonely at times.” Gardner observed. There are far more serious social costs to working oversees. “Being away from home and family is tough, and it gets harder every year,” Kowalsky noted. “I've been employed overseas since 2002. In those eight years, I can't tell you how much I've missed. Never mind holidays. I'm talking about missing the funeral of my grandmother, the wedding of my sister, countless births, too many deaths and uncounted family gatherings. What I have missed is nothing less than my life as it once was, and this causes me grief every single day. Now I have a little girl and she has virtually no contact with her American cousins or grandparents or uncle and aunts. This seems wrong to me, yet I can't simply abandon this life I've created for myself in Ireland. I do my best to get back once or twice a year, but those visits are always a bit frenetic, and they are no substitute for living in my native land.”

Researching while working oversees is a difficult matter and will often be a function of your expertise. For example, teaching in the United Kingdom makes being a historian of the British Army quite easy. On the other hand, being a historian of the U.S. South while you live and work in Australia is far more difficult. Financial funding for research is often competitive in many countries and there is often a rich get richer dynamic at work.

The system of university appropriations in many countries, Britain in particular, is tied to research and publication. Funding is dependent on the quantity of publications and graduate students that a department produces. If production falls below a certain level, the department will take a financial hit. It is something like a ball club having to win a certain number of games and sell so many tickets to stay in the major leagues, if not they end up in the minors. As a result, productive scholars are an important institutional asset to departments. In short, the more you publish, the easier it will be to get a position.

One of the challenges that Americans face when working oversees involves language issues. There is no issue in countries like Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom for obvious reasons. Since English is the new Latin, though, Americans face fewer professional challenges than they might suspect. Universities in Denmark, Germany, India, Korea, Pakistan, and Turkey use English as their language of instruction. The law in the Netherlands requires that all graduate courses be taught in English.

There are limits to this universality of English. For example, even though the University of Ottawa is in Canada, it is bilingual in French and English. Most Canadian universities are either all English or all French, but a scholar should be prepared to learn French if they plan to work in Canada. While graduate classes in the Netherlands are in English, undergraduate courses are taught in Dutch, and if you teach at a English-language institution like Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, you will still probably need to learn a good deal of Turkish just to function in society.

Teaching is also different at foreign universities. The teaching loads are generally lighter. Many times the classes offered are seminars, and the teaching load is only two classes per semester. “I've been very fortunate to work in a department where I have not only been allowed, but encouraged to teach courses that are squarely within my area of research,” Douglas Ford, an American teaching at the University of Salford in England, observed. “This is quite different from the situation in US universities, where starting academics spend a large proportion of their time preparing classes on subjects such as Western Civ, or general survey courses that are far removed from their area of research.”

There are differences in the students as well. Ken Osgood, an American who was the Mary Ball Washington Chair in American History at University College Dublin, explained, “The Irish were very deferential.” As a diplomatic historian, he also noted that they were better informed about world affairs than what he saw at U.S. universities. Nick Cull, a British national who teaches at the University of Southern California and was at the University of Leicester before then, notes that there are reasons for this situation. Students in the British educational model (Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand to name a few) begin specializing in depth much sooner their American cousins. The degree is a major. As a result, they often know what they know quite well, but have little familiarity with other fields. The history undergraduate will not know fields like economics and English literature. The result is that while students are better informed, it is difficult for them to generalize and see “big picture issues.” Cull is quick to note, though, that the similarities among college students on either side of the Atlantic are stronger than the differences.

One of the reasons for lighter teaching loads is that most foreign universities, be they in Europe or Asia, demand more administrative service work than is the case in North America. For example, professors in Great Britain are expected to serve on admissions committees, be second and third readers for undergraduate exams and papers for institutions other than their own, help recruit students, participate in search committees, and work on the commissions that evaluate the strengths of departments in their field all across the UK. The amount of time devoted to this work varies significantly. In Britain, it the amount of service is directly tied to the amount of research you do. The more you publish, the less service that is expected of you. On the other hand, in Korea such work is a responsibility expected of a scholar upon promotion and tenure.

The amount of pay varies significant from country to country. Americans will generally find the pay at foreign universities to be equal to or a little less than what they would make in the United States with some important qualifications. For example, a lecturer in history (the British equivalent of an assistant professor) would earn around £35,000. Given the exchange rates, this figure will convert to something around $50,000 to $70,000. That seems like good pay, but this new lecturer is not living in the United States, they are living in the United Kingdom and will find they have a little less buying power than if they were in the United States. “This issue is more of a concern for those supporting a family on an academic salary,” Gardner notes. “Britain offer pretty generous social benefits for families with children, but it doesn't compensate for higher costs of fuel, clothes and particularly housing.”

With that point made, many schools in the United Kingdom have more money and can offer better salaries. Compensation in Australia is quite good. In short, this issue requires a good deal of attention.

On the flip side, foreign scholars coming to the United States need to make sure that they have things like auto, health and dental insurance. (This blog has an audience outside of the United States). No one will be denied medical care, but unexpected medical bills can prove ruinous to a foreign scholar in the USA.

Pay becomes a real issue when it comes to international travel and retirement. If you are working in a country that has a currency that is weak against the U.S. dollar, returning home will be expensive. That could become a serious issue if your research requires travel in the United States, or if you just want to return home to see friends and family. Pay is also an issue associate with savings. The pension and money put away for retirement will be in the currency of the country in which you work. If that country has a currency that is strong against the dollar, like the United Kingdom, returning home poses few financial hardships, but if you spend ten years in a country that is weak against the dollar—or the currency of your country—then returning home becomes difficult. For example, after a decade in New Zealand you might have NZD100,000 in savings, but that money suddenly becomes less than half if you try to return to the United States and if even less than that if home is in the United Kingdom. In short, the longer you are gone, the more difficult it is to return.

Where can you go to look for jobs oversees? There are several sites that you should consult. A web site that lists jobs across the globe is: http://www.university-directory.eu/. The http://www.acacdemicjobseu.com/ web site, as its name implies, lists jobs at universities across Europe. The http://www.jobs.ac.uk/ website advertises positions in the United Kingdom and Ireland, but it is much broader than the name implies. It includes positions on the continent and in the countries of the British Commonwealth. The Times Higher Education Supplement has job listings that are similar. For positions in Australia, see the unijobs.com.au web site. For jobs in Canada, University Affairs magazine is a good place to go. The Canadian Association of University Teachers Bulletin has on-line job listings. For jobs in Korea, visit: http://www.hibrain.net/.

The pace of the interview process is extremely quick at most foreign universities. “Many jobs advertized overseas do not have the long gestation period as they do in the States,” Kowalsky explained. “It is not untypical for a job announcement to be followed with interviews the following month, and the winning candidate announced immediately thereafter.

Gardner agrees: “The hiring process in the UK seems rather efficient, but also impersonal compared to what goes on in North America.” The reasons for this are fairly simple. “A candidate's research profile is pretty evident on his/her cv. Teaching ability is a bit more difficult to gauge, but if it's a secondary concern, which is the case at most (admittedly not all) British universities, then you don't need to worry about having candidates lecture to undergraduates or articulate their ‘teaching philosophies.’”

As is the case in most places and professions, timing is often important. “The best time to look is late spring,” Kowalsky explained, “when last minute replacement positions often go begging.”

Americans looking for academic work oversees have certain strengths and liabilities. Graduate programs in the United States are extremely prestigious. One of the best ways to enhance a school's reputation is to hire people from the universities at the cutting edge of their discipline. That is why 14 of the 15 faculty in the Department of Public Administration at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea are graduates of Ph.D. programs in the United States. Since graduate programs in the United States are often far more rigorous than what one would encounter abroad and search committees often see this professional focus in their applications. Daniela Stockmann, a German national who earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is now an assistant professor of political science at Leiden University in the Netherlands, observed that American trained academics are “better at knowing expectations.”

On the other hand, immigration laws and work visa regulations often work against U.S. scholars. For example, Canadian universities are legally required to state in their job ads that Canadian citizens will receive preferential treatment over scholars from other countries. There are various ways around these laws—being in country, having a spouse who is a citizen, or having dual citizenship—the legalities will vary from country to country. The short of it is that you must be prepared to deal with this issues and know that it is possible that you will be at some type of competitive disadvantage.

The best way to make yourself as competitive as possible is to spend some time on the websites of the institutions you are applying for and tailor your application package for that position. If you are asked to provide a syllabus, know how the school does its assessments and the length of its teaching terms.

Finally, most of the issues roiling American academia are present oversees. British universities have produced more Ph.D.s than the job market in the United Kingdom requires. Some foreign universities are facing budget shortfalls. In Australia the jobs are often few and far between in certain fields. As with any profession option, there are advantages and disadvantages to working overseas. Ultimately, it will be up to each individual to decide what is best to meet their own specific interests and objectives.

Blog XLVI (46): The History Ph.D. as Public Historian

What is public history?

It is okay if you do not know. Consider this comment from James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian who served as president of the American Historical Association in 2003: “I cannot remember exactly when I first encountered the term 'public history.' It does not seem all that many years ago. And I am embarrassed to confess that I initially thought public history was the story of public events—the kind of history that most of us taught and wrote before the private lives of ordinary people in home and family became an important field of historical inquiry.”

Public history is a fairly broad term. A public historian works for historical societies, state preservation offices, historical parks, non-profit organizations, museums, archives, libraries, records managers for government agencies, or businesses. They design historical displays, publish in electronic media, design historical tours and guide books, give public lectures, and write books designed for the general public. In fact, most of the authors of essays about employment outside of a history department that have appeared in this blog are probably “public historians.” According to a study the AHA conducted in 2008, almost a fourth of all public historians work for museums (23.8 percent) and another 20.5 percent work for some sort of government agency—be it at the federal, state, or local level. The chart displayed above shows the employment distribution for public historians.

McPherson is not the only one who is confused about this term, “public history.” In that 2008 study, which included a survey of 3,856 individuals doing public history, 364 rejected that job description. “I don’t have the qualifications for that title,” one of them explained.

Whatever term is used, the acid test for public history--or any other field--is employment. Who is getting hired and where? According to the AHA study, most public historians hold the MA as their highest degree (55.6 percent). Only 20.9 percent have a Ph.D. These employment figures represent a decline in the number of Ph.D.s finding in employment in public history. Another study the AHA did back in 1980 found that 38.5 percent were Ph.D.s.

This decline makes sense. There are now roughly 120 public history programs and the MA is generally the terminal degree for those programs. With that point made, there is strong ancetidotal evidence that the public history MA degree is insufficient training for the actual job. Phil Cantelon, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of History Associates, Incorporated, a firm in the business of public history, observed, “I think in all the years at History Associates, we’ve hired only one person out of a public history program. The curricula for those programs tend to be pretty narrow.” In a 2003 study that the AHA conducted on the background of public historians, one correspondent remarked that “the public history graduate programs don't give students enough history.”

Most of the subjects in that 2003 study emphasized the importance of administrative skills such as time management, budget planning, computer literacy, personnel supervision, oral history interviewing, historic preservation, archival management, museum-based education, marketing, and fundraising. Almost everyone of those respondents said what separated the successful candidates from the others was having some type of internship on their resume.

Women also seem to be drawn to public history. Employment of females in this field jumped from 36.0 percent in 1980 to 65.5 percent in 2008. The second chart makes this significant starkly clear.

The female domination of public history makes sense. Unlike men, women must make a choice between family and career. More significantly, there is an inverse relationship between education levels and fertility. Public history positions only require the MA degree rather than the Ph.D and force less of a choice between family and career. Finally, despite what most people think, traditional academia is not that supportive of family management concerns—like spousal employment for two Ph.D. couples, and child care. See Blogs XII: Sex in Grad School and XIII: Marriage and Grad School for more discussion on these issues.

What options are open for the Ph.D.? In some ways that degree is a liability. The simple way around this problem is to realize that many public history employers are looking for skills rather than a credential. These talents include good writing skills and oral communication ability. The Ph.D. can give individuals these traits, but often does not, and a job applicant needs to make it clear that they have acquired competency in these areas. The budding public historian needs to be aware that good writing is not the ponderous, jargon loaded text that often passes for style in Ph.D. dissertations and that good public speaking comes from undergraduate teaching, which may or may not be something that a graduate program develops.

What do public historians do on a day to day basis? The short answer is: it depends. There are several public history firms. There are, however, only three major companies: History Associates, Incorporate; The History Factory; and Historical Research Associates, Incorporated. Most other public history firms are one man or one woman shops, and their success is often the product of word of mouth. The services these firms provide include writing corporate histories for their clients. They also do research for hire. Much of this research is for litigation, which requires research in state and federal archives with which lawyers are unfamiliar or do not have the time to do themselves. This research can often be crucial, and can save firms millions of dollars. The corporations also do records management.

If the public historian works for a government agency, they might be doing some of the same things. The federal government even has a civil service designation: “GS-170 Historian.” These historians do research and write official histories. The histories might be written for a specific community in the government—but could be classified for decades and not available to the public—while others write histories that are designed to made available to the public immediately. Government historians also produce important reference works. A good example is Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774–1989, which historians working for the U.S. Senate produced. Declassification of the documents is another major activity. The most famous effort along these lines is the Foreign Relations of the United States series that comes out of the U.S. Department of State’s historian office. Titles like these are important projects.

Government historians also serve as the historical memory for their agencies. Basically their job is to provide policymakers with information about past efforts of their departments and bureaus. This might be collecting information on how many military personnel were deployed to Germany, Japan, Okinawa, and Austria for occupation duty, so that the decision makers have that information when they decide how many people to send to Iraq or Afghanistan. Historians also collect information that is often the result of public and congressional inquiry. Apparently during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, the Senate Historical Office spent a lot of time responding to journalists who wanted to know who Andrew Johnson was and what he did to get himself impeached.

The challenges of being a public historian are often different from being an academic one. The first thing is that most public history positions are basically office jobs. That means it is an 8 to 5 position. You have to be in the office at a certain time. That is far more structure than what many people see in an academic environment. Vacation time is often more limited. Forget getting a month off in December and three in the summer.

The good news is that with most of these jobs, work stays at the office. There is no grading papers at home, at night, and on the weekends. More significantly, the pay in these positions is generally better than what you will find in academic positions. That is as it should be since you do not have the same time off that you get in the summer and the holiday season.

A reoccurring theme among public historians is that there is a good deal of on the job training. “History Associates has a training program for all our young people. We’ll train them on research. We train them on how to do a budget, how to track a budget. We, in effect, give them a little entrepreneurial training,” Phil Cantelon explained. The fact that many people commented during the 2003 AHA study on the importance of having an internship is an indication of the importance of hands on training.

Another major difference between the public historian and the academic historian is that they must be generalists. If you work for a government agency, you need to be prepared to work on any time period or topic involving your employer. A military historian cannot respond to an issue involving the Vietnam War, by telling a general or an Assistant Secretary of Defense, “I don’t know, I am a Civil War historian.” They need to be prepared to respond to issues involving the artillery in the Korean War or the Chaplain Corps during Vietnam. The same is true for the private for profit firms. “HAI historians must be generalists, not only because they must be prepared to handle a variety of topics from book to book but also because clients, understandably, want general rather than specialized histories,” Kenneth Durr, Senior Historian and Director of the History Division of History Associates, explained.

Most public historians also work as part of a team. “I do not think we often think—as historians—about collaborative efforts, but it is great to be involved in one, and it provides a wonderful pool of knowledge form which we can draw. One of the things I enjoy most about my job is that I learn something new every day and as a result of researching new topics frequently, I am constantly learning,” Melissa Jane Taylor of the U.S. State Department’s Historian's Office, observed. Cantelon has a similar view. Group work is something that does not happen in history graduate programs. “Teamwork’s hard, for trained historians especially, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

A big problem that public historians face is the perception that they are glorified publicists; that they must offer the interpretations that policymakers want or that their clients demand. "We realized that being paid for our work would open us up to remarks about being court historians. We never thought about public history; we thought about being history professionals, serving clients who needed the very best history, and being paid for it,” Cantelon recalled. His colleague Durr argues that market forces work against such manipulated history. “The demand for historical works by paying clients is, of course, a small one. But that works in our favor. Those who come to us almost always value history and know that somehow their organization can benefit from it. Still, few know exactly why this is, and our first job is to help them reach that understanding,” he explained. “It can be argued that we don't pay as close attention to the negatives in an organization's history as journalists or academics might. But that is a luxury we do not have. We do not cover up the blemishes (most of our clients, in fact, insist that we do not) but we do paint with a broad brush, and from that perspective nearly every story we've told is a generally positive one. Our clients have all provided society with valued services, products, and expertise.”

Such considerations also come into play for the public historian working for a government agency. “Federal historians do not adopt an ideological approach to their historical narratives that castigates government, nor do they write under the interpretive direction of agency administrators as ‘court historians,’” Victoria A. Harden, president of the Society for History in the Federal Government, explained in 1999. “In general, when a federal historian is writing a scholarly article as an authority in the field, he or she enjoys the same degree of editorial freedom as do scholars in academia. This is not the case, however, for highly controversial topics—the only topics for which the concept of academic freedom has important consequences. Federal historians, whether civil servants or contractors, do not speak or write from a personal viewpoint when acting in their official capacities on matters that have political consequence for their agencies. Their work, whether an exhibit, a book, an article, or a web site, is subject to review and approval by agency administrators.”

There is a good deal of self selection at work in these positions. “Now it is true that a historian who believes that the American military basically consists of a gaggle of cement-headed Neanderthal fascists is unlikely to apply for a job as an army historian in the first place,” Stanley Sandler, a historian with the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, observed. “Conversely, anyone simple enough to look upon the military as the spotless repository of all that is good and true in America will also not get far beyond the first interview. Army historians, of course, can point out that there are prevailing trends and fashions that academic historians up for tenure violate at their professional peril.”

The court historian issue gets to a bigger issue—that there is a deep divide between the academic and public history communities. “Public historians may sometimes feel like the Rodney Dangerfields of the profession (‘don't get no respect’),” Sandler stated only half in jest. Ann Deines, a National Park Service historian, added, “When someone discovers I work for the National Park Service, they invariably ask if I get to wear the Smokey Bear hat.”

There are many reasons for this division. Few--very few--academic historians, particularly those at the supposedly leading schools have ever been outside of academia. Good grad students, or so the conventional wisdom holds, will go into tenure track positions. It is the weaker ones that will have to look for non-traditional history jobs. “While researching about different careers and the many ways in which one can practice history, I was struck by the academic community’s failure to regard those outside academia as historians engaged in scholarly and valuable work,” Alexandra Lord, a historian for the U.S. Public Health Service observed. “Having embraced these foolish prejudices as a graduate student and then a professor, I have come now, as a nonacademic historian, to wonder why these prejudices are so pervasive. What does it say about our profession when we believe that historians who work with senators, reporters, policy analysts, and the general public should not be the among the best of our profession? What does it say when we dismiss the historian who uses his or her degree in a unique and innovative fashion that promotes the study of history?”

There is also a certain amount of hostility among public historians towards the academic community. “I watched as the job market fell apart in the early '90s. Other than hand-wringing at dismal statistics, the AHA didn't give a damn" one public historian told the 2003 AHA study. Another remarked, “A PhD is not likely to be hired—[it] indicates a professorial candidate who lost tenure.” Cantelon of History Associates said, “The company is a source of great personal satisfaction to me. But it is also my frustration. One of my biggest challenges as a professional historian outside the academy is convincing the academy that there is a potential market for historians other than teaching or going into archives.”

Cantelon also provided a possible reason for these divisions. “Almost every profession in the academy has a division between teaching and doing. You can teach law, or you can practice law. You can teach medicine or practice medicine. But in history, you can only teach, or that’s what historians think. But it’s not really true. You can do work, you can practice history outside, you can apply history, and do excellent professional work.”

If, with all these considerations in mind, you are still interested in public history, where do you go to find a job? There are several different places to look. The National Council on Public History has a website with job listings.

The civil service designation for a historian is "GS-170 Historian." Almost all jobs with the U.S. government are listed on: http://www.usajobs.gov/.

The Historical Research Associates, Incorporated has a page listing its current openings.

The History Factory has a listing of available jobs.

A good website for finding jobs with state and local governments is: http://www.50statejobs.com/.

The American Association for State and Local History as a listing of open jobs.

H-Net's job listings have a category for public history jobs, but most of these seem to be for faculty to teach public history.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a listing in its job advertisements for "organizations other than colleges."