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This is certainly unsettling. And, as he says, not just historians.
The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession
Entire areas of our shared history will never be known because no one will receive a living wage to uncover and study them. It’s implausible to expect scholars with insecure jobs to offer bold and innovative claims about history when they can easily be fired for doing so. Instead, history will be studied increasingly by the wealthy. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/14/o...-academia.html
I was lucky enough to have one last free article from the NYT website, the linked article in the OP is paywalled.
An opinion written by a person with a Master's degree in History and on the tenure track at a university, it makes the point that institutions of higher learning in the US have shifted away from the Humanities and the social sciences and towards the STEM disciplines. The op-ed also notes that colleges and universities have shrunk their number of academics in the "soft sciences" while at the same time greatly increasing the number of administrators.
Per the op-ed, not only are the potential historians not receiving adequate salaries for a job that requires a master's degree, they're also being denied tenure. Historians will be unprotected in their employment and will have less willingness to advance theories that might upset those who hold the purse strings. The science of history may well become the handmaiden of those who wish to fund it for their own purposes.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." - George Orwell, 1984
This is a slippery topic for the History Forum. While it's about History as an academic discipline, it's about the current state of the science. I can see this thread easily crossing over into a current political discussion.
The opinion piece was sort of a lament on the state of historical scholarship, more or less. I think we have maybe seen some of this happening if we paid any attention. The competition with STEM is one issue that we have been aware of. But we have also moved historical scholarship in an almost inaccessible direction. We need the specialized scholarship but sometimes it gets a bit silly… and too arcane to be of much value or interest except to other narrow focused specialists. We need more of a quality emphasis on accessible public history to make the field relevant in the current cultural and political environment. Many of us have been alarmed at the sorry state of public knowledge of history and how it is sometimes twisted into peculiar arguments or theories. If you spend much time watching history programs on TV you might come away with the notion that space aliens or Atlantis survivors are partly responsible for the advance of human history. My daughter just attended the AHA meeting in Philadelphia and she came back with a very negative impression of the direction and focus of that major history organization. There should be a more public face of history.
History, as taught as part of classical education of the past two or three centuries, still has all the texts and resources. It isn't going anywhere.
What is at issue here is the question of who writes the narrative of more recent history. The Koch brothers effectively bought their way into academia and other major benefactors eased out. Shifts in courses reflect that.
I am of the opinion that real history is less written by professionals, and more by those of us with singular passions for areas or events and an insatiable drive to discover and then document. Professionals most certainly have a place, especially in fact checking and verification of claims, but it can get impossibly self-referential if allowed to sit unchallenged.
When a professional historian does little but read, extract pages, compound a dozen or so sources into a new book, and have voluminous footnotes and cites and NO original thought, I groan. That is little more than regurgitation in seek of status and recompense.
Continuing access to original material can allow future historians to fill in gaps, no matter if the profession is shrinking and the slant twisting.
Not to worry, "professional" historians have various backgrounds from academia, to journalism and as in the case of Barbara Tuchman, doing research while raising children, some work for museums. The hard part is getting a first book published if you are unknown.
By way of example, even the "professionals" disagree. Who won the War the 1812? The British historians claim they did, Americans claim they did. What is ignored, what is included. Another example is The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III by Roberts. Was King George the ogre as portrayed in American history or was he a constitutional monarch who was as the title says misunderstood. And even the 750 pages of the book leaves out things.
I'm looking forward to Volker Ullrich's Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler's Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis going on sale...maybe Barnes and Noble will put it at 30% off...Ullrich is a journalist, not an academic.
That’s a problem because real, good history requires money. It takes lots of time, and lots of money to travel and access and find resources.
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