Blog CXCIX (199): Reviewing the Official Historian

HONOLULU, HAWAII—A few weeks ago I read an article that John M. Carland, a historian working in the office of the Secretary of  Defense, wrote in Headquarters Gazette, the newsletter of the Society for Military History.  In "Why the American Historical Review Will Not Review Official History and Why It Should" he documented his discovery that the journal of the American Historical Association will not review in its book review section official histories produced by the various armed services.

In his article Carland quoted at length from his correspondence with Robert A. Schneider, the editor of the AHR:  "Indeed, on the face of it, [he continued] there certainly shouldn’t be any distinction between scholarly books based upon their provenance—it’s the scholarship that should count. That is, if the book is scholarly—and if it meets our other criteria, then it should be reviewed by the AHR as well as other journals. The fact is, however, that these 'other criteria,' not the origins or publisher of the book, are often what disqualifies it."  The journal Schneider notes gets a lot of books and basically does not review biographies, collections of documents, edited volumes, textbooks, second editions, or books aimed at a general audience.

In crafting his response, Schneider also turned to his book review editor who was direct, if ill informed.  “It is the commission that is problematic: what are its terms and limitations? How much of the source material is publically [sic] available, and how much requires access only granted to scholars who agree to certain conditions?” In further communication, Schneider doubled down on this point.  The problem with official histories is that they "often rely upon sources that cannot be verified or often even consulted by outside historians. I think it’s reasonable at least to assert this as a potential obstacle. Furthermore, there is the question of the disinterestedness, independence, and autonomy of a historian who is employed by or belongs to the institution or enterprise which he’s investigating."

There are a number of problems with these responses.  First, as Carland discovered, the AHR has over the years reviewed official military history from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Germany and Russia.

A second problem is that it leads the journal to ignore major events on its own home turf.  McNamara, Clifford, and The Burdens of Vietnam by Edward Drea was a volume in the official series on the development of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.  It got a lot of attention for its findings.  “This is not your standard, bland official history,” George C. Herring of the University of Kentucky, one of the leading scholars on the Vietnam War noted in a news story The Washington Post did on the book.  The coverage of that book was nothing compared to Black Soldier, White Army: The 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea by William Bowers, William Hammond, and George MacGarrigle.  The 24th Infantry was one of the last segregated, all-black units in the U.S. Army and many veterans of the unit spent 17 years lobbying the U.S. Army to commission this book, arguing that the first volume of the Army's official history of the Korean War, South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu gave a devastating account of the regiment's performance in combat when it stated the regiment broke under fire and ran from the enemy.  When Black Soldier, White Army failed to exonerate the unit, showing that the 24th had indeed collapsed in combat, veterans of the regiment threatened to sue to prevent the release of the book.  This controversy was the subject of news stories in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, and USA Today.  This book was the subject of a four-page review from Russell Weigley, a former president of the Society for Military History, in Reviews in American History.  And yet, nothing in the AHR.  That seems wrong.

A final problem with the AHR's criteria is that it is based on ignorance and a tad bit of exaggerated self-importance.  In most ways, the official history program is designed to help large government agencies learn about what worked and what did not work, and why.  The program—at least in the U.S. Army—has been implemented to facilitate historical coverage, not offer sanitized version of what happened that glorify the military.  General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower made this point clear in the order authorizing the U.S. Army in World War II.  Historians working for the military—who almost always have Ph.D.s—have often been concerned about being considered court historians.  Ronald Spector, the first civilian ever to serve as the chief of Naval History and now a professor at George Washington University, pushed back against the court historian view in a famous article: Ronald Spector, "An Improbable Success Story: Official Military Histories in the Twentieth Century" The Public Historian vol. 12, no. 1 (Winter 1990), 25-30.  As Spector shows, the system they work in mitigates against such a development.  The regulations governing the official histories, require detailed citation to the documents.  These historians can use any source material they wish; memoirs, oral histories (that they often conduct themselves), and official documents.  If they use documents that are still classified, the publication of the official history becomes grounds for those documents to be declassified.  Forrest C. Pogue, who is considered by many public historians to be a pioneer in the field, said one of the reasons he worked on the official Army histories was to facilitate the declassification process.  One final point: many things make policy: state interests, politics, etc.  History is not one of them.  At least in the United States.  The Secretary of Defense—and his staff—are busy people, dealing with difficult issues involving Russians in the Ukraine and Iran's interest in nuclear weapons.  They do not really have time to worry about Black Soldier, White Army: The 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea or even McNamara, Clifford, and The Burdens of Vietnam.  If the people at the American Historical Review think that historians have that kind of influence, or that components of the military that are dealing with contemporary issues are concerned about events from four to seven decades past, they are fooling themselves.  Americans—even those in the in military—just do not hold on to historical issues for long.

As you might tell, I have mixed reactions to this little controversy.  First, I am a book review editor myself for Presidential Studies Quarterly and I understand the American Historical Review perspective.  I really do.  We do not get the volume of books the American Historical Review does, but one of the first things you learn as an editor is how much of the literature you do not know.  If I am facing this problem with books about Theodore Roosevelt—is this book important? Who do I ask to review the book?—I suspect the folks at the AHR are facing this problem on a much, much larger scale.  The second thing is that you will get books that are just not appropriate for the journal.  You have to have criteria for saying no.  It must be professional in nature, and you have to be able to explain it clearly to people that are going to be disappointed with your reply.  (All of this has happened to me.)

On the other hand, it is the AHR.  Although people like to claim that this journal is the flagship publication in the historical profession, it is not.  There are just too many people, working in too many diverse sub-fields for one journal to claim to be the publication of record for all historical time periods and topics.  The AHR made sense the 1910s when the history departments at major schools like the University of Wisconsin or the University of Texas had four and five members, and one of them might have been "the Europeanist" or "the Americanist."  Even after the journal outlived its usefulness, book reviews in the AHR still served a real purpose when it reviewed major works in various fields.  The purpose of a book review is to let you know what books you need to read, and which ones you do not.  A journal that offered a comprehensive and broad collection of books about various historical topics and time periods was really, really useful.  The AHR managed to do that until sometime in the early to mid-1990s.  You can have a good career without getting reviewed in the AHR.  Of my five books, all listed to the side, only one—the Olympic book—has been reviewed in that journal. (This point was driven home during a research trip I took in August to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.  I was waiting for the archivists to deliver some documents I had requested and was thumbing through several journals that were available on the rack of current periodicals to which the Library subscribed.  The AHR was one of them and I went to the book review section, and was stunned at how nothing in the entire section seemed even slightly relevant to my research, teaching, or simple history buff interests.  Maybe that is just me, but it is generally not a good reaction for a journal that wants to be the main publication in the field of history.)

The criteria that the Review uses also seems to be counter to its own interests.  The AHR does not review biographies.  That seems quite shortsighted to me.  I do not even understand why.  There is an entire Pulitzer Prize category for biography.  Another wrong call, is the refusal to review books that are aimed at the general public.  Some of these are simplistic trash, but others are quite innovative and have significant impact on the historiography of their field.  Even if they are not that good, they get attention that the field has to respond to, if for no other reason than to dismiss it, and one of the ways it does that is through the review process.  Bad reviews have utility. Just to repeat myself: the purpose of a book review is to let you know what books you need to read, and which ones you do not.

The biggest reason the AHR and its staff are wrong is that the history profession might be on the verge of undergoing a fairly large transformation.  Back in October 2011 Anthony T. Grafton and James Grossman, the president and executive director of the American Historical Association wrote an article "No More Plan B: A Very Modest Proposal for Graduate Programs in History" in which they said history departments need to realize that that many or maybe most of their graduate students would end up pursuing non-academic jobs and careers.  I was a bit skeptical about that article, but it does seem that the AHA has increased efforts to support initiatives in this direction.  If the AHA is serious about supporting scholars in non-academic careers, then the Review needs to be serious about treating scholars doing non-academic work seriously.  If people are writing about history and getting an audience, even if it is not through peer reviewed publications, the AHR needs to be offering assessments of those works.

Then again, maybe the Association is not serious about its Plan B efforts. Or maybe there is a schism in the AHA that I am not aware of; one branch of the AHR might be refusing to support the effortr of another branch.  I do not know.  One thing is clear: for their own good and the good of the profession the staff and editors of the AHR need to rethink their policy and/or offer a better explanation.

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 CLXIV (164): History in Congress

A few days ago the National Coalition for History, which is a lobbyist organization in Washington, D.C. funded by a number of scholarly organizations, announced that its efforts to create a Congressional History Caucus had finally resulted in the creation of that organization. Two Republicans and two Democrats in the House of Representatives agreed to serve as the leadership of this organization. The purpose of the new caucus is to celebrate the past of the United States and use historical knowledge to make better legislation. The four congressmen state that a passion for history should cross partisan and ideological divides.

Sounds really good, right.?

Yes, of course, it does, but I am not sure it really matters.

A caucus is a group of members in the United States Congress that share common interests of one sort or another. Sometimes they are divided along partisan lines, sometimes they are bipartisan. Some are limited to members of only one branch of the Congress, some include members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Congressional History Caucus is currently limited to members of the House of Representatives. There is talk of creating another one in the Senate.

I do not have a problem with this new caucus. I am just not sure it will matter. There are currently 312 caucuses that members of the House can join. Some of them are serious and powerful. For examples, see the Congressional Black Caucus or the Republican Study Committee. Others make you wonder. These are the likes of Congressional Friends of Scotland Caucus or the Congressional Cut Flower Caucus. Some seem like social organizations. The Congressional Baseball Caucus and the Congressional Boating Caucus come immediately to mind. Oddball organizations are not particularly new. In 1949 House Republicans formed the Chowder and Marching Society, which was part political and part social. The two most famous members were Richard Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. Here is the current list of caucuses in the House.

Now historians have their own caucus. Do not be surprised if it has little direct or indirect impact on your career.

Blog CLXIII (163): Is Blogging Scholarship?

Is blogging scholarship? That was the topic of a session at the recent annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. The session had a number of historians that have gotten involved in blogging activities and who have-and this point is important-established traditional records of scholarship to their name.

My response to this question: Are you serious? No! Not in anyway.

The session was impressive. The chair of the session was Jeffrey Pasley of the University of Missouri who contributed to the team blog The Common Place.  The participants run some of the more important blogs out there like Ann Little of Colorado State and the blog Historiann, John Fea of Messiah College and The Way of Improvement Leads Home, Mike O'Malley of George Mason University who has a blog called The Aporetic, Ben Alpers of the University of Oklahoma who is part of the team that writes for the U.S. Intellectual History Blog, and Kenneth Owen of the University of Illinois at Springfield and writes for The Junto blog. These blogs have large audience-on blog terms-and each is very different from the other.

Little said "no." Her reason: "Blogging is not scholarship because at least in the case of single-authored blogs, it is not peer reviewed." All the others said some version of "yes." They were wrong.

Every point Little made has merit. She noted that a newly-minted Ph.D. needs to worry about getting published in traditional venues and that blogging takes time away from that effort. She is right. Blogging is not peer-reviewed and does not count for tenure or promotion. She is right. Blogging can "advance and promote" scholarship, but it is not scholarship in and of itself. She is right. John Fea admitted that everything she said was correct: "This is the way things are."

I would have made other points. Very few historians blog and there is a reason for that. We have many outlets for getting our views out there: books, journals, anthologies, classrooms, conferences, and journalism as either a source or a guest contributor. There is not a lot of value added in this medium. Blogging is a mighty perishable medium. Traditional research and publications endure for decades. For some fields of scholarship that move slowly-like history-that is an important consideration. (Some historiographies move rapidly others see one major work every two or three decades). Will the article published in a journal be available in a library in 25 years when some grad students who is 5-years old at the moment wants to read and then cite the work. Will that be the case with a blog? No idea, but my guess is not. I want endurance, which is why I try to avoid citing websites. They change often quite frequently and I want people to look at my source material as well as my findings.

Nor are there any quality filters. Peer-review is a gate keeping mechanism to ensure quality. There are other mechanisms in place in different mediums to ensure quality. The professional reputation of journalists, editors, and literary agents keeps them from pushing forward bad ideas. With any blog, anyone with an internet connected can post anything no matter how dubious.

Media formats have changed fairly quickly over the past three or four decades. There is nothing to say that will not happen again in the next decade or two. In fact, the electronic communication media seems to be moving away from blogging. Just type "Is Blogging Dead" into Google and see the results.

The other participants said, there was value in blogging. I would not dispute that, nor did Little. Fea said many colleges are taking a broader view of scholarship, using the ideas of scholarship that Ernest Boyer advocated. I doubt that. More importantly, his position did not rebut Little's argument. O'Malley said scholarly communication is constrained to a few mediums and there are other ways to do this and the blog is one way. Maybe, but only maybe. Alpers and Owen were more enthusiastic, but not convincing. Owen noted he is trying to use his blogging for tenure purposes and that his university is using the Boyer model.

Like Little, I have invested a good deal of time and energy into blogging. I have done so with a realistic understanding of its limits. Some people believe it helps authors connect with other writers and with their audiences. Maybe, but I think that is more the exception rather than the rule. If blogging really works well, it can help build a reputation just like an article in The New Republic, but an article in The Atlantic or The Huffington Post or an op-ed is not scholarship. Bolstering your reputation is never a bad thing.

To see the entire session, go to Youtube. The question and answer session is quite interesting.

You can also read the contributions of each participant:

• Ann Little, "Off to OAH to Answer the Question: Is Blogging Scholarship?"
• Mike O'Malley, "Blogging and the Return of the Repressed"
• John Fea, "A Few Thoughts on OAH Panel "Is Blogging Scholarship?
• Ben Alpers, "Is Blogging Scholarship?"
• Ken Owen, "Is Blogging Scholarship: Refelections on the OAH Panel"

Blog CXLVI (146): History vs. Applied History vs. Public History

I wrote an article for the AHA newsletter Perspectives on History that is out in the current issue.  I basically use it to push some reform recommendations on the AHA that will help the organization improve job opportunities for those who are looking for work.  A good deal of editing was involved to get the article down to the required word limit.  I dropped a couple of my recommendations and also eliminated a discussion of history vs. public history vs. applied history.  The purpose of this posting is to expand on that last point since very little of it got into the final version. 

The term “applied history” is not common.  I see “applied history” as disciplines that use existing historical knowledge to address practical problems in other fields and professions.  I wish I could claim it as my own, but the first time I heard it was in 2001 at a teaching workshop when Andrew J. Bacevich, a historian teaching in an international relations department, used it to describe the courses he taught.  It is a pretty good description of the courses that I teach at the Naval War College.  These classes are about two-thirds history (military and diplomatic) and about one-third political science (international relations and political theory).  We are using the history to develop analytical skills among our students so they can become strategists for the armed services (our students are military officers or civil servants working for various agencies of the U.S. government—State Department, Federal Bureau of Investigations, etc.).  Some of the questions we explore are historical in nature, while others are designed to test theories or answer ahistorical issues.

Applied history is also a good term for a number of other professions that study the past on a regular basis.  These career paths include historians teaching in other disciplines, archaeologists, social scientists, librarians, archivists, and editors.

History—and by that I mean the type of study that one regularly encounters in a department of history at a college or university—develops information to explain and understand phenomena, events, and trends of the past.  We can call this “history,” or  “academic history,” or “basic history” or “pure history.”

The real question then is how is “applied history” different from "public history”?  In some very real ways it is the same thing.  As I understand it, the term “public history” replaced “applied history” as a basic descriptor.  Needless to say, this term is a bit confusing.  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.”

While the term “public history” is one that many historians might recognized instead of “applied history,” it is incredibly vague.  It is often used to describe some very different activities that have little to do with the public sphere. The job duties of "applied historians" like myself and Bacevich are not that much different than what an academic historian at some place like...oh, say...the University of Kansas or Kansas State University might be doing.  In fact, Bacevich is an academic; he is a tenured faculty member at Boston University.  My job is also pretty much the same as some one at Kansas or Kansas State, I grade papers, run seminars, read books, and do service work for the college and my department.  There are many other people that use history to explore the issues relevant to their academic fields and they are often housed in different departments at a college or university.  They include people studying: economics, music, math, art, kinesiology, and business.  Most archaeologists, social scientists, librarians, editors of historical paper collections, and archivists are also academics.

Public historians, I would argue, are primarily those that are interfacing with a large audience comprised of the general, non-academic public. This description is not to say that doing intellectually irrelevant work or having little interchange with academics.  The big difference for them is that history is very often a consumable product for their audiences that might exist for educational purposes, but could also exist for entertainment or for issues specific to certain professional disciplines.  Teaching is usually not in their mission set.  People in these fields include historical preservationists, journalists, documentary filmmakers, professional writers, national historical park staffs, museum curators, staff historians of government agencies, and individuals working for research firms.  Public historians might have a Ph.D. in history, but many times it is something they earn along the way to bolster their other professional experiences and credentials. (In this sense, the Ph.D. is not a two way street; while it helps someone in these fields, the degree does not in and of itself make one qualified to do this type of work).

Much of this discussion got cut from the Perspectives article, which was appropriate.   It took the article off target.  I also wrote at great length about public history in Blog XLVI (46): The History Ph.D. as Public Historian.  It is a good essay and has been one of the more popular postings on this blog.  This discussion, though, explains a major thrust of that previous article.  There is a big, huge divide between historians working in academic history departments and those scholars working in applied or public history.  In Blog XLVI, I quoted Alexandra Lord, a historian for the U.S. Public Health Service, on this matter: “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.  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?”

So, why is this relevant to an article about reforming the AHA in the hopes of improving the job market?

Glad you asked.  A basic problem the AHA faces—even if it don't know it—is it isolated.  Most AHA leaders have gone from undergrad status to graduate school to faculty positions, and have very little knowledge of other professional opportunities for historians.  The AHA needs to make efforts to reach out to other fields.  One way as I discuss in the article is to open up the AHA presidency to people in these other fields.  That recommendation is in the article. Another way—which got cut—is to create an "applied history" division within the AHA to reach out to scholars working in other disciplines and/or public history.  My hope is that the organization can sponsor conferences and sessions at the annual meeting, arrange for the publication of articles in Perspectives, and provide services like including "applied/public historians" in the annual directory of history departments in a noticeable way (maybe make it a directory of institutions rather than departments) or make advertising jobs in perspective cheap and affordable for other organizations.  The ultimate goal of all this broadening activity is to alert AHA members—be they mentors to young scholars or the job seekers themeselves—to the employment opportunities that exist beyond the history department. 

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."