Everything has a history. Even the AHA’s initiatives sometimes are less originally conceived than the executive director thinks. Sometimes a particularly insightful and independent-minded member offers an idea that nobody picks up until more than a decade later, and the executive director hasn’t done his homework and read back issues of Perspectives on History. So for my April 2015 column I turn to our colleague John Burnham, research professor at Ohio State University, and reprint—with apology and admiration—his contribution to Perspectives in April 2000.
Those of us at the AHA who have been working on Career Diversity for Historians have been well aware of the debt that this initiative owes to the committee and staff work a decade ago that produced The Education of Historians for the Twenty-first Century (2004). We also drew upon the experience of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation’s Humanities at Work initiative (1999–2006), and the insights of former Wilson Foundation president Robert Weisbuch.
None of us, however, had read Burnham’s prescient essay. In February, after I described our Career Diversity for Historians initiative to humanities faculty and graduate students at Ohio State University, my friend and colleague Stephanie Shaw observed that this was all fine and good, but that actually one of her colleagues had come to the same conclusions many years ago, with an articulate—but unheeded—plea. She subsequently sent a citation to the article below. Burnham followed up with a concise summary of the argument: “The gist is, we teach history. What our students want to do with it is their business. If we keep framing history exclusively in terms of the professoriate, we do a great injustice to what we have to offer.” Indeed.
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