“How come you don’t act like a historian much anymore?” asked my seven-year-old daughter as we walked on the Assateague Island National Seashore. It wasn’t a complete non sequitur. I can never let a good material culture moment slip by, so we had been discussing Indigenous peoples’ use of quahog shells like the one she had just found. But this question made me stop short.
At that moment, I was feeling very much like my historian self, having spent the week on the final edits to my book on the American Civil War, meeting with the National Archives’ FOIA Advisory Committee on which I serve, editing Perspectives articles, corresponding with potential authors for an American Historical Review special issue, and finalizing details for an upcoming NEH teacher institute.
“What do you mean? Why don’t you think I act like a historian?” I asked. “Oh, never mind,” she said. Earlier in the day, she had asked if I was like a substitute teacher because I taught a course at American University that semester. Then it hit me: “Do you mean why don’t I teach anymore?” “Well, yeah,” she replied hesitantly. “Don’t historians have to teach?”
I don’t know where she got this idea. She has stood in exhibits that I co-curated at the National Museum of American History. She knows that I talk to congressional staff, that I guide teachers on using material culture, that I write about my research, that I work on the magazine that arrives in our mailbox, that I volunteer on the board of a local historic house. She tells people, “My mom is a historian.” In fact, last I’d heard her describe it, my job is “investigating the mysteries of the olden times.”
But she now has other historians in her daily life, who are indeed full-time teachers. Her second-grade teacher has excited her about the history of ancient Greece, China, and India. Two of her Girl Scout troop leaders are middle and high school social studies teachers. She has discovered that history is something that is taught. Still, I thought that my daughter would have an expansive idea of what being a historian can entail because she saw me doing so many different things—teaching, talking, writing, curating, advocating, volunteering.
Her question was an important reminder: Our idea of what a historian is—of what a historian can be—and what their work looks like begins to be formulated at an early age. But how do you explain broadening the definitions of historians’ work and scholarship to a child? Tell them that “historians do lots of things and have different kinds of jobs”? We could, but the real work must begin with ourselves. The takeaways from the AHA’s Career Diversity initiative or the Guidelines for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship will not be part of how younger generations understand the work of historians unless we actively value the diversity of historians and their work. Factoring that work into promotion and tenure decisions, as the guidelines emphasize, is only a start.
We must value that work as a community of historians inclusive of people employed in a wide range of professions. Our discipline cannot be a closed community to which one must gain acceptance. It has to be a space of welcome—a means of connecting people who care about learning about and from the past. Only by embracing the vibrance and possibilities of historical work will rising generations see us living out the reality that being a historian requires no single kind of job, that a historian’s scholarship takes no single form.
It turned out that my daughter was actually relieved that not all historians have to be teachers. “Well, I want to be a historian too,” she said. “So what kinds of things do historians get to do?” This Perspectives issue, in which 12 historians reflect on their wide-ranging work as scholarship, begins to answer that question. While some historians get their start intrigued by “mysteries of the olden times,” the variety of careers and ways of creating and disseminating scholarship presented here offer an exciting sampling of the richness of the ever-expanding ways that historians do history today.
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