Blog CVI (106): Eight Questions: Diplomatic History

Today's entry represents the start of a new feature on "In the Service of Clio."  The blog is asking a number of newer scholars in many different fields for their take on career management issues.  The idea behind this series is to increase the voices and perspectives that are aired in this forum.  While this blog is familiar with some fields of history more than others,  that is not the case for all of them or even most of them. The first entry in this series is on diplomatic history and our guest blogger is Jonathan Reed Winkler.  He is an associate professor of History at Wright State University.  Winkler is the author of Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I (Harvard University Press, 2008).  This book has won three major book prizes: the 2008 Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt Prize in Naval History, the 2009 Distinguished Publication Award from the Ohio Academy of History, and the 2009 Paul Birdsall Book Prize from the American Historical Association.  He received his PhD with distinction from Yale University and his B.A. from Ohio University.  He has previously taught at the University of Maryland and the U.S. Naval Academy.

What is the greatest strength of your field? In the history profession?

To my mind, the greatest strength in the field of U.S. foreign relations is the constant connection to contemporary affairs. Our field is vibrant, to be sure, with a tremendous amount of scholarship, a multiplicity of methodological approaches, and deepening interconnections with other historical fields. But behind it all lingers a sense—or perhaps a demand—of relevance for the field to current crises or events. How did we get here from there? Is any of this new? The general public and university undergraduates, and not just our fellow academics, want to know why the U.S. is involved in the places where it is and what all is going on. Our field is well placed, more so than most others, to answer those questions or at least show how to begin to think about them.

Thinking about the larger profession of historians, it seems to me that the demand from the general public is one of the greatest strengths for the historical profession. The public wants to know what happened in the past, for all of the reasons that the past is useful for constructing community, defining identity, and providing guidance. Who are we, and where did we come from? How did our ancestors deal with difficult decisions at times of great trouble? That interest will remain strong despite the ebb and flow of passing academic fashions or scholarly disputes, and can never confined only to those with great educational attainment. This connection to the public remains a source of strength and protection, something the historians in the academy should recognize and embrace more.

What is the biggest issue facing your field? The history profession?

The field has gained a vitality that would astonish those who, in the 1980s, were condemning it as one that had lost its way or had little to say to outsiders. But that vibrant outpouring of scholarship, the proliferation of new approaches and interpretations, has presented a different problem: one of aggregating all of the work and retaining a sense of what are the most meaningful contributions the field can make to other historical fields or to those in other scholarly disciplines. What are the core questions that the field should address? How can the field overcome the growing divide between those who work on topics after 1945 and those who do not? Unlike its cousin, the field of military history, the study of foreign relations is not necessarily concerned with war or the threat of force to attain national objectives, although questions of expansion and national power are at the heart of the field and where, traditionally, most of the work had been done. But there are many scholars in the field who work on other issues of international relations that have nothing to do with those matters (or at least only tangentially). There are also those who, for whatever reason, disdain the pre-20th century period as lacking in importance or relevance. Increasingly we can see foreign relations scholars working on the early republic or the Gilded Age finding solace with their peers working on other topics in those time periods. It seems to me that the issues are going to be, over the next generation, deciding whether those working in the field will be expected to have a core appreciation and understanding of what might be called the security side of the field or not, and whether they will be expected to be conversant with the full sweep of U.S. foreign relations, not just the 20th century forward. If the answer to one or both questions is no, then how should one distinguish among the different types as the divergence continues?

There are many issues facing the historical profession, but the one I have been pondering the most recently is what many are calling the higher education bubble. When and how the bubble will pop we do not know, but when it does the effect on what we do could be severe. History will to a great extent be protected more than some humanities disciplines—there is a market for what we do (it is not always remunerative, but people will show up for a history talk). But there will be growing challenges to the relevance of certain historical work, a need to justify more forcefully why someone should be studying, say, transvestite vampire prostitutes in 14th Century Moscow or why such work is only appearing in journals few read and no one cites. (On this as a problem in English literature, see Mark Bauerlein’s recent article “The Research Bust” in The Chronicle of Higher Education for more). To be sure, esoterica in history can be illuminating and often essential—that’s the only way certain historical paradigms can shift. Some fields (such as naval history) are in crisis for lack of understanding about certain auxiliary topics that actually affect the core interpretations in the field. But the profession needs to think about how to weather the relevance issue as the higher education bubble pops, administrators ask for more tuition, the sports programs stumble onwards, parents question the utility of a college degree, students demand topics that the faculty do not think of as ‘important’ or ‘worth studying,’ unaffiliated historians publish books that the public actually buys, and many promising scholars never find a secure position from which to conduct research and publish.

What is the most interesting work being done in your field? Why?

I’d identify two areas where what I see as the most interesting work is being done. The first is international history that is based on serious multi-archival, multilingual research. With the access to government records (the U.S. government’s recent reclassification efforts notwithstanding) that is available around the world we’re seeing young scholars with the language abilities to work in these archives do so. For example, we can point to the work of Lorenz Luthi and Sergei Radchenko on the Sino-Soviet split, drawing on U.S., Soviet, Chinese and other government documents and providing a multilateral picture that is valuable not just to foreign relations historians but historians in multiple fields. I’m aware of a number of ABD and recent PhDs. as well who are doing similar path-breaking work with new archival materials that is invigorating this field. Achieving the level of language proficiency required for effective archival work in those records is very difficult, but very rewarding.

The second is on the growing incorporation of science and technology topics to the study of foreign relations. I’ve just concluded a substantive historiographic review of the literature on U.S. foreign relations dealing with technology and the environment since 1941, so I am a little biased here, but it has only been in the last fifteen years or so that our field has really taken on these topics in a meaningful way. The work that has been done is vibrant, innovative, and very useful not just for us but also for scholars in the history of technology and environmental history fields. We’re starting to ask new questions about the past based on our present concerns, from cyberwarfare to global warming, which means that we’re uncovering new topics and reexamining older established topics. I have a sense that we will see a paradigm shift in thinking about the 20th century and foreign relations from this. While we have mostly concentrated on the impact of nuclear technology on world affairs (i.e. nuclear weapons and the Cold War, proliferation, et cetera), I think in the future we will see far more work on the impact of electronic technology on calculations about national power and weakness, be it from developments in weapons systems and military capacity, global information and cultural exchanges, financial transactions, and so on. But as with language, being able to engage these topics effectively requires a level of understanding about the technology that has to approach what was known and understood at the time, and that is not always easy. After all, how many of us ever actually keep the instruction manuals from our cell phones or DVD players?

How valuable is teaching in the professional development of a career?

For a career as a scholar working at a university, I think teaching is essential. It forces you to organize, to condense, to present effectively and to consider the impact of your explanations. I think that teaching the survey course is particularly important, and not out of a sense of shared labor with the others in the department. Rather, it is too easy to find oneself stuck only in one’s own discipline and forgetting the context. Teaching the survey—both the larger geographic and chronological ones or the particular field–I have always found to be useful in remembering the bigger picture and forcing me to consider the larger context of topics in my own research. It is a skill that one must develop over time and keep fresh through repeated practice. But it is a skill that has long been considered a signature part of our profession. If you read memoirs or obituaries discussing the great historians of the early and mid-20th centuries, such as Bemis, Merk, Bailey, or Blum, for example, their skill as teachers come across as one of their greatest legacies.

What direction or type of publishing would you advise a new Ph.D. to conduct?

The publishing field is going through a major realignment now, and the academic presses are much less inclined to pick up works that are too narrow, and certainly ones that suffer from poor writing and too much academic jargon. I’d counsel that even before a doctoral candidate finishes he or she talk to those in the program who finished several years before to understand what the process of finding a publisher was like and what expectations there were. There should certainly be discussions with likely publishing houses, if only to get a sense of what is expected and what will not be of interest. This information can help the doctoral candidate to structure the dissertation in ways that will make it more marketable without compromising the core requirement of turning out a quality dissertation. And, to be honest, going onto the market with a contract is never a bad thing. But above all, the new PhD. must remember that history is literature, and make the finished product as polished a piece of writing as possible.

What issues affect most the development of a career: family, school resources, popularity of field, reputation of alma mater, etc.?

That’s a tough one to answer, because those influences are going to be different for each individual depending on whether the career objective is to be an excellent teacher, a stellar researcher, or effective academic leader (one should aspire to lead, not just manage), or some combination of the three. But, here are my views on this some seven years into this profession. It seems to me that reputation of both the graduate program and the advisor can matter a great deal in getting one to the short list for hiring, but that is only beneficial at the beginning of the career. Few care where you came from if you cannot hack it, and few look at that part of your CV the farther in you go. Conversely, some will resent your work if you appear to have gotten a position because of your program and advisor (and not much else at the time of hiring). The popularity of the field matters, but again, one cannot coast on that alone. My own topic was not ‘popular’ but in retrospect it certainly was timely. If a place is teaching-oriented, the research background is anyway of secondary importance to the ability to teach and to be effective for the institution in the classroom. I’m also less wedded to the importance of the resources at the institution. That can certainly matter if one is working on a subject (say, East Asian literature) where you need to have the materials at your research library. But this is less the case in my area of work. Secondary literature from across the state is available through a cooperative library network, so I can obtain anything I want in a day or two, and for primary research I expect to travel to the materials (archival collections and repositories) in any event. It would be nice to have more funds from my own university, but I was trained in graduate school to expect that there would be no funds and to seek them out from external funding sources on my own. That has an additional benefit—it shows autonomy and resourcefulness, rather than dependence (on one’s own institution), and can be a catalyst for more funding later.

But what does matter if one is to be successful in this business? Being resourceful, for one. Do not expect the institution, the publisher, or anyone else to provide all the support needed for the career. Find out ways to solve problems yourself. Being connected, for another. That does not mean coming from the right background or academic institutions. Rather, it means developing a network of those working in the field, in neighboring fields, and in completely unconnected fields, and at all manner of institutions (not just the most research-oriented). This is how opportunities open up and lasting friendships are made. A third is being balanced. Turn out quality work, not a giant quantity of work. We should, it seems to me, aspire to publish things that will still be consulted two generations from now. Far too often I see work that is meant to make one look important now but which, upon closer inspection, leaves rather a lot to be desired and will not be remembered in two decades. Fourth, being reflective. What seems to constitute success when one is in graduate school is not necessarily what the version of you twenty years later would define as success. Reflect on the career as it develops. Be willing to adapt to the circumstances to make the career successful in different ways as time goes on. Reject any sense of jealousy that your peers seem to have ‘made it.’ And remember what Cornelia said about jewels and her children.

What advice would you give to an undergrad interested in working on a Ph.D. in history?

To go out into the real world and work first. Too often I have encountered undergraduates who have internalized the education system as ‘the world’ and seek to demonstrate their ability to master it by pushing all the way through to the doctorate as if it were the best trophy of all. But that’s not a reason to get the PhD. or to become an academic. One should become an academic because, having considered all of the possible paths in life, that is the one that best suits his or her temperament. But if they are hell-bent on going through to get a Ph.D, it is imperative that we give them ‘facts of life’ early on about what the Ph.D is and what seeking one entails. We’re pushing here for an annual event with our undergraduate student organization aimed at juniors to disabuse them of the notion that obtaining a Ph.D is ‘perfection’ in the academic system, inform them of what the profession is really like, and impress upon them how to prepare now (in their junior year) for success in a graduate program.

What advice would you give to a new Ph.D. unable to find employment in a history department?

Think laterally. If teaching at a 4-5 institution on a small salary, or perpetual adjuncting, or no job at all, is not how you envisioned the academic career, consider other places where the demonstrated intellectual attainment will still be a marketable skill. The federal government’s history offices are an excellent alternative, and one does not necessarily have to live in Washington, D.C.—there are historians all over the country working on all manner of topics. Such employment is seen as a plus among diplomatic historians seeking an academic appointment later. There are companies that specialize in contract research for clients to provide historical or contextual background on important topics, and they employ PhDs. Use network connections to find out what other job opportunities there are in the broader business world—it may be that the skill set developed for the dissertation (such as quantitative or economic analysis) is of use for looking at contemporary problems. Finally, remember that success is a personal definition—working outside of the university on rewarding projects that earns a salary is never failure. One will always be a historian, and can even do research on the side or in the free time albeit at a diminished level. Quite a few serious scholarly works have been written by those who are not even in the academy. I can think of several who, empowered by their day job, have acquired an additional skill set that permits them to analyze evidence (particularly financial and governmental data) in ways that they would never have been able to understand as a mere academic, and sometimes would never have thought to consult.

Administrative Note 17

This blog is taking a vaction for the Christmas holidays.  See you in 2012 with some new posts and a new series.

Blog CV (105): The Plan B Debate Revisited

Today's entry is a lengthy article from The Chronicle of Higher Education about alternative employment.  The article is entitled "More Universities Break the Taboo and Talk to Ph.D.'s About Jobs Outside Academe."  The author is Audrey Williams June and it appeared in the November 6, 2011 issue.  It is related to this blog, because it mentions the "Plan B" debate.  I think June and her sources exaggerate the attitudes of faculty about alternative careers.  My view is that most professors have gone from their student days to their faculty positions and know nothing else.  As a result, it is not hostility, but ignorance that accounts for their attitudes and lack of assistance.  This article, though, does offer students an opportunity to raise the issue with their mentors.  The conversation can start like this: "I was reading the Grafton/Grossman article..." or "The 'In The Service of Clio' blog said..." or "Did you read that article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about alternative employment, what should I be doing?"  Here is the article:

A gathering on Ohio State University's campus here last month had the familiar trappings of a traditional college lecture. Graduate students filed into an auditorium, and some cracked open their laptops or pecked the screens of smartphones as they waited for the speaker to begin.

But in one important way, this lecture was different than most they would attend as doctoral students.

The speaker, Paula Chambers, would talk openly about a subject that graduate students tend to discuss in hushed tones among close friends or trusted mentors-or anonymously in online forums. The taboo topic: preparing for nonacademic jobs.

"You're in charge of your career," Ms. Chambers said to the audience of about 200 students in the arts and humanities. "My message to you today is you need to prepare to be versatile."

Her speech was a defining moment for Ohio State, where humanities departments had pushed for an event that would give graduate students information about alternative careers. Interest eventually grew so large that the event was sponsored by the graduate school and the arts and humanities division of the College of Arts and Sciences-home to students in disciplines where a tight academic job market has made alternative careers more attractive.

The invitation to speak at Ohio State was a homecoming of sorts for Ms. Chambers, owner of the Versatile Ph.D., a Web site that supports a community of graduate students in the humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences who want to pursue careers outside higher education or are contemplating such a move. She graduated from Ohio State in 2000 with a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition, and went on to a nonacademic career of her own.

Her speech was part of a first-time Alternative Career Day, which also included a panel of former graduate students in nonteaching careers, among them the founder and managing partner of a venture-capital firm and the director of admissions and student services at Ohio State's school of public affairs.

"This is like a stamp of approval on what I've been doing and talking about for so long," Ms. Chambers said of the event.

Cultural Barriers
While universities like Ohio State are putting new emphasis on helping Ph.D. students explore nonacademic careers, some research universities have been focused on those efforts for several years. Among them are the University of Pennsylvania and Duke, Harvard, Michigan State, and Yale Universities, which were the founding subscribers to the Versatile Ph.D. last year. They also employ career counselors who cater specifically to graduate students. Those counselors and others meet annually at the Graduate Career Consortium, where alternative career paths for graduate students have recently been a topic of discussion.

Ohio State's graduate-school dean, Patrick Osmer, plays a key role in conversations about post-graduate-school careers at his institution and nationwide. Mr. Osmer, also vice provost for graduate studies, is chair of a new commission set up to examine what graduate students know about their career options and what graduate programs are doing to help their students make the transition into employment. The commission, formed in September by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Educational Testing Service, expects to release a report in April.

"I've been thinking a lot about what we're doing on campus," Mr. Osmer says. "It's important that students and faculty know more about what the opportunities are."

The culture of academe often makes it hard for Ph.D. students to explore those opportunities. When they enter doctoral programs, their professors and many of their peers expect them to become professors-cut from the same cloth as their graduate advisers. Some faculty are against efforts to highlight career paths that don't lead to the professoriate, particularly because their reputations, and those of their graduate programs, hinge on students' finding teaching positions at top institutions.

But advocates for giving graduate students information about multiple career options say the realities of the job market demand it. And for some doctoral students, the work they seek after graduation is not an alternative career-a term that some say relegates nonacademic jobs to second-class status-but the only work they've ever wanted.

'Consolation prize'
Although Ohio State and other colleges across the nation are increasingly working to show graduate students that their degrees can be viewed as more than entry tickets to the professoriate, some Ph.D. students aren't getting the same message from their departments. Students are also not sure of exactly how to pursue alternative careers. And even when faculty members support their students, they usually don't have the expertise to help.

During her presentation, Ms. Chambers said she knew that some of the students in attendance couldn't talk about exploring nonacademic careers with their advisers, or even with their peers. Indeed, fear that their advisers would learn of their interest in alternative careers kept a handful of graduate students approached by a reporter from talking, even anonymously.

"As a rule, faculty have not been seen as friends in this conversation," she says. "That's true nationwide."

One Ph.D. student at a West Coast research university can relate. Last winter she came to grips with something she'd been struggling with since entering graduate school: Life as an academic wasn't for her. She never really liked doing research. The teaching that she once loved, and that she had hoped to do as a professor at a liberal-arts college, lost its appeal. And the academic job market, including in her social-sciences field, was abysmal.

But telling her adviser of her plans-at least at that point-was out of the question. "When I was a first-year grad student, he said, 'We train you to go into academe,'" says the student, now in her fifth year, who didn't want to be identified, because she feared her adviser's reaction to her plans. "It was clear that there weren't supposed to be any other options."

She has a new adviser now, and she doesn't know how he will react when she tells him soon that she won't pursue a position as a professor after she earns her doctorate next year. She has been exploring career options in higher-education administration, academic advising, and student or academic affairs. She has also considered doing research for human-rights groups or the United Nations. Other students in her program have gone on to work outside academe, but "the impression I have is that it's seen as sort of a consolation prize," she says.

No More 'Plan B'
The American Historical Association wants to change negative attitudes about career paths outside higher education. The association this fall strongly urged graduate programs to stop casting tenure-track jobs as the only acceptable career choices for their students-which, by default, makes any other position students may pursue a "Plan B." In a recent essay, Anthony T. Grafton, the association's president, and Jim Grossman, its executive director, called for "No More Plan B."

"We need to ask universities and career centers to be more helpful," says Mr. Grafton, a professor at Princeton University. "I would hope that deans would help with this, too. I think professors, especially, have to mobilize everything they can to help their students."

A new follow-up essay by the two authors suggests ways in which the association, universities, and faculty members could do a better job of exposing graduate students to nonacademic careers and supporting them as they search for such positions.

Mr. Grossman says Mr. Grafton's outspoken support of the issue should make academic historians pay heed to the duo's important message.

"He's one of the top people in his field at one of the top institutions in the country, and he's making this statement that having a Plan B isn't the way to go," Mr. Grossman says. More historians, he says, "recognize that it's in the best interest of their students to think more broadly about what they can do with their degrees."

What the history association is pitching has resonated with people in other humanities disciplines. Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm, an associate professor of German at Ohio State, agrees that the culture in academe has to change.

"I'm very open to all possibilities for my students," she says. "But there are people, mostly senior faculty members, who don't even want to talk about this issue."

The Alternative Career Day events last month could be used as a way to educate students and professors about Ph.D. students' skills that appeal to employers outside higher education, says Ms. Taleghani-Nikazm, who is also graduate-studies director of her department. Among the skills highlighted by the panelists were project management, perseverance, problem solving, and the ability to work independently-all of which are honed in writing a dissertation.

The reluctance in higher education to view graduate students who don't become professors as successful often stems from the linear career paths of most professors, says Katharine S. Brooks, director of liberal-arts career services at the University of Texas at Austin. "They wanted to be professors, and now they are," she says. "It becomes hard for them to see someone else doing something else."

D.J. Hovermale, an Ohio State Ph.D. student, will soon have a career that many faculty wouldn't have steered him toward. He originally wanted to return to his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Kentucky, to teach after earning his doctoral degree in computational linguistics.

When he started his Ph.D., in 2005, he was "feeling great" about the academic job market for scholars in his field, he said during the panel session at the Ohio State event. Although Kentucky didn't have a linguistics department, it was rumored that the university would start one soon. Then the recession hit, and Kentucky cut short its plans to expand.

"There were hundreds of people applying for every job listed," Mr. Hovermale said. "It didn't look like the prospects for getting an academic job were very good."

For Mr. Hovermale, practicality won out. He told his adviser that he was shifting to what was, for him, Plan B. When he completes his Ph.D., in December, he will go to work for the Department of Defense.

Making a Choice
Unlike Mr. Hovermale, Andy Holdsworth knew before he began his doctoral degree in conservation biology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities that he wasn't going to become an academic. So he made a point to choose an adviser who would accept his future career path and whose students had gone on to nonacademic careers.

"A lot of advisers don't want to take on people who have career interests like mine," Mr. Holdsworth says. "But mine was an endowed chair, very secure, he was well funded."

Mr. Holdsworth, who completed his Ph.D. in 2006, says he began laying the groundwork for an alternative career during the first semester of his doctoral program. He interviewed conservation scientists who worked at nonprofit groups and at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, where he is now a science-policy coordinator.

Many graduate students in the hard sciences are in departments where a precedent has already been set for pursuing a career outside academe, often in industries associated with their fields or in government jobs.

But that's not always the case, says Nathan Connors, who earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Minnesota in 2004. He knew that some students went on to work in industries, such as at pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies, but that "there wasn't a whole lot of open discussion about what the alternatives were," he says.

Mr. Connors, however, began thinking about alternatives on his own, even as he applied for a postdoctoral fellowship at Penn. "I was always a pretty strong writer from grade school all the way up," he says. "I thought maybe I could integrate analytical skills from graduate school and connect them with writing."

He also realized during graduate school that it would be difficult to balance being the parent of a young child with life as an academic scientist on the tenure track.

With the support of his postdoctoral adviser, Mr. Connors began to apply for medical-writing positions. He has worked for a regulatory-writing company and a company that publishes research articles in scientific journals. Now he's a freelance science and medical writer.

Mr. Connors empathizes with people who agonize over leaving academe behind. "You've been in school so long, and it's the culture that you know," he says. "To switch out of that is difficult and stressful."

The Value of a Ph.D.
It can also be tough for graduate students to figure out what nonacademic career to pursue. But Ms. Chambers and the other panelists at the Ohio State event advised students to volunteer at nonprofit agencies or other places where the work interests them. People with doctoral degrees, she told the audience, can apply for jobs in the federal government, educational consulting, policy analysis, public history, and finance, among other things.

Chad Allen, an associate professor and director of graduate studies in English at Ohio State, is among the faculty members who want to make alternative careers more accepted for Ph.D.'s. But he says graduate students have to make a tough choice.


"This is a hard thing to talk about because the truth is, to be a successful academic, you have to be really obsessive about your work," Mr. Allen says. "You can't take the time off to pursue other things."


Some of his first-year students were at the Alternative Career Day sessions. "I think they're just curious," he says. "They're thinking, 'Keep your options open.'"


That advice worked for Ms. Chambers, who skipped going on the academic job market altogether and went to work as a grant writer for nearly five years at three nonprofit organizations. Her advisers, although supportive of her decision to pursue a non­academic career, couldn't offer specific advice about how to land work outside higher education.


That information void pushed Ms. Chambers in 1999 to create an e-mail list called WRK4US, the precursor to the Versatile Ph.D. "It basically became my career," says Ms. Chambers, who managed the list as she wrote her dissertation. She kept it up even while writing grant applications for a living. Last year the list became the Versatile Ph.D., a full-time business venture for Ms. Chambers.


The site, which allows users to participate anonymously in discussion forums on various aspects of nonacademic careers, now has nearly 11,000 individual members, among them graduate students, new Ph.D.'s, faculty members, and people who are already in nonacademic jobs.


Twenty-seven research universities, such as Ohio State, pay subscription fees that support the Web site and give students, faculty, and staff access to premium content that includes first-person narratives from Ph.D.'s in nonacademic careers and archived panel discussions in which graduate students ask questions of those who work outside the professoriate.


"A lot of us think that the future and the health of all of our programs depends, in some sense, on redefining the value of the degree," Mr. Allen says. "The degrees are valuable beyond recreating ourselves on the faculty. And that's a good thing for all of us."

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 CI (101): The Plan C Debate

The Grafton/Grossman vs. Lemisch debate was interesting, but not that instructive. Lemisch has a point that the AHA has not done enough, but his specific ideas are not feasible and vastly exceed the resources of the history profession. Grafton and Grossman have as a follow up to their Plan B article published another article in Perspectives on History entitled, "Plan C."  It is a clever title, but the main thrust of the article is to emphasize a second time the arguments they made in their “Plan B” article. The two certainly realize that the history business has some serious problems and they want to be constructive in finding solutions, like offering more sessions at the AHA annual conference on career management issues and using the AHA website to make the profession “less hierarchal.”

They also make it clear in this article that the AHA will not be taking the lead, which only underscores Lemisch’s complaints about the organization. They argue that solutions to the job crisis need to come from history departments that produce Ph.D.s. They advocated a program similar to the one I suggested in Blog XCVI, but they also make it clear that good projects like these must be the responsibility of individual institutions.

What are we to make of those positions? I understand their view and it is legitimate—the AHA is an umbrella organization and can hardly order the history department at Stanford (or at any other school) to do something—but they are arguing for their limitations. With that attitude, there is no doubt that those limits will sure enough be theirs and that of the entire organization. I also found much of the essay vague. What specifically do they want to see happen? Details are absent. Finally, I am a little disturbed with an important implication of this essay. They have basically written off those scholars that have already finished their Ph.D.s and graduated. They are talking about making changes to shape the future, but very little about helping some of the most vulnerable members of the AHA.

With those points made, there is still a lot that the Association can do even within the existing power structure of the history profession. My suggestions are listed below. Some of them are issues I have discussed before, but many are new:

1) Sponsor a Conference on What the AHA Can Do: Make this a weekend, non-academic conference. Invite roughly 30-40 historians (much more and it becomes counterproductive) who have been taking the lead on job market issues. Make the mission of this conference one of brainstorming and idea generation on concrete initiatives that the organization can take to solve the problem. Maybe the answer is very little, but some outside perspectives might also generate new ideas that no one in the leadership had considered.

2) Sponsor a Conference on What Departments Can Do: There is no anti-trust laws applying to departments talking to one another and trying to initiate similar programs that can move the profession in certain directions. This type of meeting will help a number of university officials across the country from having to reinvent the wheel over and over again Like the first proposal, kake this a weekend, non-academic conference. Invite roughly 20-30 historians from leading departments who can speak for their home institutions and are deeply involved with graduate student education. (Department chairs and directors of graduate education are probably the best type of people rather than distinguished, award-winning star of the department). Make the mission of this conference one of brainstorming and idea generation on concrete initiatives on what departments can do.

3) Subsidized Membership for Applied Historians: Grafton and Grossman made it clear they want to broaden the membership of the AHA as a way of expanding the career paths open to history Ph.D.s. The term “public history” is often used to describe these positions, but that is a misleading phrase and describes some very different activities that have little to do with the public sphere. I prefer the term “applied history.” The people that study the past other than academic historians include: archeologists, political scientists, librarians, archivists, journalists, documentary filmmakers, historical preservationists, professional writers, museum curators, and editors. There are a number of sub-divisions within those categories. Many of these people doing this type of work often hold a Ph.D. in history; many do not and do not need one. For example, a degree in architecture might be more useful for a historic preservationist than one in history. Many of these professions have their own professional associations that already attract the attention, time and money of people working in these fields. If the AHA wants to broaden its base, it needs to make membership in the American Historical Association attractive to these individuals and one way to do that is to make it very cheap for a several years until an awareness of the AHA and what it can do seeps into other fields.

4) Create Two New Divisions: The first should be for school teachers. This division can offer important advice to AHA members that want to go into this field of teaching on the requirements for getting teaching jobs that usually vary from state to state. It can also offer summer workshops that help keep school teachers well versed in history. The second should be for “applied history,” which is to say scholars in other academic fields that are often housed in different departments and colleges and usually require specialized skills (like fine art; legal; medical; and mathematical historians) and people that are doing history out in the public sphere. This division should develop programming that helps bridge the divide between history and other academic disciplines.

5) Discount Advertising: The AHA should offer steep discounts to organizations other than history departments wanting to put job announcements in Perspectives. These organizations would be institutions like archeology departments, public history firms, state agencies that do historic preservation, etc. By steep discount, I mean $1 for a certain word length, and $2 for a larger size. The idea behind this suggestion is that the AHA has to make itself an asset for organizations other than history departments, if it is truly going to be an inclusive to all career types studying the past. At the moment, other professions have done pretty well without much interface with the AHA. It is quite easy for people to advertise on H-Net and not bother with the AHA newsletter. A discount for these institutions is a loss-leader for the organization. The AHA might lose money in the short run from this advertising, but by making more services available to members, it makes membership far more rewarding and useful and will maintain and even increase the numbers of people that join the AHA.

6) Add Other Fields to the AHA Presidency Rotation: The AHA had several presidents who came from other closely related fields like political scientists, library science, and archeology. Some like Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt did not even have Ph.D.s. Since the end of World War II, the AHA has been dominated by Ph.D.s in history departments. It is time for the AHA to begin making efforts to bring others into the organization. Broadening the leadership of the AHA, the flagship organization in the history business, is the first step in expanding the organization’s knowledge of other professional career paths where the history Ph.D. can find gainful employment and make a contribution to our understanding of the past.

7) Develop an AHA Alternative Career Speaker Series: Most AHA members have gone from grad school to professional employment as professors and often do not have good ideas or contacts in other fields that can help their students. Many historians have had to do a lot of trailblazing on their own that the rest of the profession does not appreciate. Why reinvent the wheel again? A speakers series that the AHA sponsors can make these experiences better known to the professorate ranks and will enhance the personal and professional reputation of these “applied” or “public” historians. It is a good way to get the conversation started that Grafton and Grossman want to see take place. These communities are not talking to one another and the AHA needs to take the lead in initiating these conversations.

8) Develop Conversion Programs: The AHA should invite a number of these “applied historians” to a series of small, weekend workshops or conferences designed to explain the skills that a new historian will need to find work in one of these fields. While a Ph.D. in history often bolsters the credentials of an applied historian, the degree often does not make one qualified to do this type of work. This was a point that a number of public historians made in Blog XLVI. Put another way, the degree is not a two way street, and the AHA needs to help their junior members find ways to use the assets the degree does bring.

So, how does a history Ph.D. trained to become a professor convert to working in another field? To answer that question some of the issues this type of program needs to address include: Will newly minted history Ph.D.s need another degree? A masters in library science is usually mandatory for most librarian positions; on the other hand, a historic preservationist might only require a certain number of courses in architecture. What other type of criteria are required? Clippings from magazines, newspapers, and websites are often crucial for people wanting to enter journalism. Articles and book reviews in academic journals are never really appropriate. Are internships important? In documentary filmmaking, this often the case. Where do you go to find these jobs? These type of jobs are rarely advertised in the AHA newsletter and there are specialized websites that list historic preservation jobs, museum positions, etc. What organizations should one join and which conferences should a budding scholar attend? Just as if you were a military historian, you would want to join the Society for Military History in addition to the AHA, there are professional museum organizations that one might want to join if you want to be a curator.

The product of these small workshops can come in several formats: a series of AHA published pamphlets that can be offered on the organization’s website: “The History Ph.D. as Documentary Filmmaker,” etc.; a series of sessions at the AHA annual meeting; template or syllabi for programs that history departments can use to convert their Ph.D.s into these career paths, or an AHA speaker series on alternative careers.