Daniel sent us this one — he's been reading Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem, which he calls a masterpiece of detail and narrative, and it got him thinking about what professional historians actually do. He admits he went in with a certain mental picture, older men in tweed, something like our stereotypes about archaeologists, and was surprised to find Montefiore younger and more grounded than the grandeur of the name suggested. The real question underneath is, is historian even a job anymore, or does expertise in history mostly funnel people into other careers?
Oh, this is one of those questions where the obvious answer is yes, obviously it's a job, and then you actually look at the numbers and realize the obvious answer only covers about twelve percent of the story.
That's suspiciously precise.
The American Historical Association tracks this. Of the roughly four thousand new history PhDs produced in the United States over the last decade, only about one in eight landed in a tenure-track professorship within five years. The rest scattered across government agencies, museums, corporate research, publishing, law, intelligence analysis, documentary filmmaking, you name it. So the job exists, but not in the shape most people imagine.
The tweedy professor in the book-lined office is basically the vinyl record of the history profession. Still around, beloved by purists, but no longer the default format.
And Montefiore himself is a fascinating counterexample because he never held an academic post. He studied history at Cambridge, but he went into banking first, then journalism, then full-time writing. Jerusalem was a book he wrote because he couldn't find the single-volume history he wanted to read. He spent ten years on it.
Ten years on one book. That's either dedication or a hostage situation with a keyboard.
It paid off. Jerusalem came out in 2011 and it's been translated into something like thirty-five languages. It won the Jewish Book Council's Book of the Year. But what I find interesting is how the academic historical community received it. Some were enthusiastic, others were deeply uncomfortable with a non-academic writing a sweeping narrative history of one of the most contested cities on earth.
Because he's not credentialed enough, or because the sweep itself is the problem?
Academic history has been moving away from grand narrative for decades now. The big book that tells the story of a whole civilization, the kind of thing Gibbon did with Rome or Macaulay with England, that's fallen out of fashion. Modern academic historians tend to write monographs, hyper-focused studies. The economic impact of grain distribution in third-century Anatolia. That sort of thing. Incredibly valuable work, but it doesn't end up on airport bookshop shelves.
Montefiore committed the dual sin of being readable and covering more than one granary.
Some critics did go after him for it. There was a review by the historian James Barr that basically accused him of relying too heavily on older secondary sources, of not engaging enough with recent archaeological scholarship, and of flattening some of the complexities in service of narrative momentum.
Which is the classic tension, right? Narrative versus nuance. The more you capture of what actually happened, with all its ambiguity and contradiction, the harder it is to tell a story that keeps people turning pages.
Montefiore's response, which I think is worth taking seriously, is that he never claimed to be writing the definitive academic history. He was writing a biography of a city, emphasis on biography. A life story. That's a different genre with different obligations. He's foregrounding character, drama, the through-line of human experience across three thousand years.
It's the difference between a medical textbook and a patient memoir. Both are true, but they're true in different registers.
This gets to the heart of what Daniel's really asking, which is what historians actually do with their days, and the answer is wildly more varied than the public assumes. Let me sketch out the landscape. You've got academic historians, who teach and research at universities. That's the minority. Then you've got public historians, which is a huge and growing category. Museum curators, archivists, historical consultants for film and television, National Park Service historians, people who run historic sites.
The people who make sure the costumes in period dramas aren't using zippers in the eighteenth century.
And that work is genuinely rigorous. A friend of mine consulted on a BBC production and spent three weeks just researching the correct buttons for a particular regiment's uniform in 1812.
Of course he did. The internet would have eviscerated him otherwise. There is no fury like a historical reenactor who spots an anachronistic button.
Then there's corporate history. Big companies employ historians to maintain their archives, write official histories, sometimes to inform branding and strategy. Wells Fargo has a full-time corporate historian. So does Coca-Cola. Disney has an entire heritage division. These are serious research positions.
I want to pause on that because there's something slightly unnerving about a corporate historian. Are they doing history, or are they doing public relations with footnotes?
That's the tension, and good corporate historians are very upfront about it. The ethical ones insist on independence. They'll tell the story of the company including its failures, its labor disputes, its environmental screw-ups, because that's what makes the archive credible. The ones who just write hagiography, nobody in the profession takes them seriously.
The job exists, but it comes with a built-in credibility audit. Every publication is also a statement about whether you can be trusted.
And then there's government. The State Department has an Office of the Historian that produces the Foreign Relations of the United States series, which is the official documentary record of American foreign policy. That's historians doing the unglamorous, painstaking work of compiling, annotating, and publishing primary documents. The Department of Defense has historians in every branch. The Senate Historical Office employs historians. The CIA has historians who write classified internal histories of operations, partly for institutional memory, partly so the agency can learn from its own mistakes.
I'm trying to imagine the job interview for that. "So, tell us about a time you documented something that cannot be discussed.
The clearance process alone must be fascinating. But the point is, these are real jobs with salaries and career ladders and professional standards. The National Council on Public History estimates there are more public historians working in the United States than there are tenure-track history professors. Possibly twice as many.
The public imagination has it exactly backwards. We picture the professor as the default and the museum curator or government archivist as the alternative path, when in fact the professor is the niche.
That's been true for at least twenty years. The academic job market in history collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis and never fully recovered. Universities realized they could replace retiring tenured faculty with adjuncts and visiting lecturers at a fraction of the cost. So you have this generation of brilliantly trained historians who did everything right, PhD from a top program, published dissertation, teaching experience, and they couldn't get a foot in the door.
Which sounds bleak, but it also forced a kind of diaspora that may have been healthy for the discipline. Historians ended up in places where historical thinking was desperately needed and had been absent.
And this is the part I find exciting. There's a growing recognition that historical thinking is a skill set, not just a body of knowledge. The ability to evaluate conflicting sources, to understand context and contingency, to recognize patterns without falling into crude analogies, to construct narratives from fragmentary evidence. That's applicable to an enormous range of problems.
Intelligence analysis is basically applied history with higher stakes.
Intelligence agencies know this. The CIA's Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis was founded by a historian, and its curriculum is deeply shaped by historical methodology. How do you assess the reliability of a source? How do you avoid mirror-imaging, assuming the other side thinks like you do? How do you recognize when you're being led by your own narrative preferences? These are historian's questions.
It's also, I think, what separates a real historian from someone who just really likes reading about the past. The method, not the enthusiasm.
That's a crucial distinction. And Montefiore is an interesting case here because he's not a trained academic historian, but the book demonstrates genuine historical craft. He worked in archives, he read primary sources in multiple languages, he engaged with the scholarship even when he departed from it. He's not just a popularizer summarizing other people's work. He's doing the work.
Though having read chunks of Jerusalem myself, I noticed something. The book is almost entirely political and military history. Kings, wars, conquests, treaties. The social history, the economic history, the history of ordinary people just trying to live their lives in this city, it's there but it's secondary. Is that a fair criticism?
It's a fair observation, and it's one that several academic reviewers made. The historian Rashid Khalidi, who wrote his own book on Jerusalem from a Palestinian perspective, argued that Montefiore's Jerusalem, for all its narrative power, is fundamentally a history of the city's rulers rather than its inhabitants. The voice of the ordinary Jerusalemite, the shopkeeper, the pilgrim, the housewife, is largely absent.
Which is partly a source problem. Ordinary people three thousand years ago didn't leave memoirs.
Right, but for the more recent periods they did, and the choices about whose voices to amplify are interpretive choices. Montefiore made a decision to foreground the dramatic political narrative, and that decision has consequences for what kind of history he's telling.
Even in a book as capacious as Jerusalem, there's a framing. There's no such thing as the complete history. Every history is an argument about what mattered.
That's one of the first things you learn in graduate school, and it's one of the hardest things to communicate to the public. People want the definitive account, the neutral telling, and it doesn't exist. You're always selecting, always emphasizing, always interpreting. The question is whether you're transparent about your interpretive choices.
Which brings us back to the job question. Because if history is inherently an argument, then being a professional historian is partly about being honest about the limits of your own arguments.
That's a skill that transfers everywhere. I know historians who work in tech companies doing what's essentially institutional memory work. Why did we make this product decision in 2019? What were the assumptions we were operating under? What did we learn from the failed launch three years ago? Companies have amnesia. They forget their own past constantly, and they repeat mistakes because nobody documented the reasoning.
The corporate world's approach to its own history is basically, we tried that once and it didn't work, but we don't remember why, so let's try it again.
And a trained historian can come in and say, here's the document trail from that decision, here's what people were saying at the time, here's the context that made it seem like a good idea, here's what changed. That's not just archival work. That's strategic insight.
The answer to "is historian a job" is yes, but the job is less about producing new historical knowledge and more about applying historical thinking to problems that don't look historical on the surface.
I'd add that even in the traditional sense, the production of new historical knowledge, there's more happening than meets the eye. The academic monograph is only the most visible output. Historians also do peer review for journals, they serve on editorial boards, they consult on documentary films, they write amicus briefs for court cases involving historical questions, they testify before Congress.
Wait, amicus briefs. That's a thing?
When the Supreme Court takes up a case that involves historical interpretation, say a Second Amendment case where the question is what the phrase "well-regulated militia" meant in 1791, both sides will submit briefs from professional historians arguing for their interpretation of the historical record. The historians aren't just providing facts. They're making arguments about meaning, and those arguments can shape constitutional law.
Historians are, in a very literal sense, helping to determine what the law means right now. That's about as far from the tweedy-professor stereotype as you can get.
It's controversial within the profession. There's a debate about whether historians should be advocates in this way, whether it compromises scholarly objectivity. But the counterargument is that objectivity was always partly a myth, and that historians have a civic responsibility to bring their expertise to bear on public questions.
I'm reminded of something Howard Zinn said, that you can't be neutral on a moving train. The train is moving whether you comment on it or not.
Zinn is actually a perfect example of this tension. He was a trained academic historian who wrote A People's History of the United States, which is one of the most influential history books of the twentieth century and also one of the most criticized by professional historians for its selectivity and its overt political agenda. He made no pretense of neutrality. He said explicitly that he was writing history from the perspective of the oppressed.
The book sold millions of copies and shaped how a generation of Americans understands their own country's past. So whatever the academy thought of his methods, he was enormously effective as a public historian.
Which raises an uncomfortable question. Is the goal of history to be accurate, or is it to be meaningful? Ideally both, but when they come into tension, different historians make different choices.
Montefiore seems to split the difference. He's not an ideologue like Zinn, but he's also not writing for a peer-reviewed journal. He's trying to tell a gripping story that's also rigorously sourced.
I think that's harder than either extreme. The ideologue can ignore inconvenient evidence. The narrow specialist can ignore the demands of readability. The middle path requires you to do both kinds of work at once.
Let me ask you something practical. If someone is listening to this and thinking, I love history, I might want to do this professionally, what does the actual training path look like now? Not the idealized version, but the real one.
The undergraduate history major is still one of the most popular majors in the humanities, and it's actually holding up better than English or philosophy in terms of enrollment. But the advice I'd give to an undergraduate today is very different from what I'd have said thirty years ago.
Thirty years ago you'd have said, get the PhD, aim for the tenure track, good luck.
Now I'd say, major in history but double major in something that gives you a technical skill. Data science, geographic information systems, digital archiving, a foreign language with real fluency, not just the two years of coursework. The historians who are thriving in the job market are the ones who can do things that non-historians can't easily replicate.
The pure historian, the person who just reads deeply and writes well, that's not enough anymore.
It was never really enough, we just pretended it was for a while during the postwar expansion of the university system. But even the great narrative historians of the past, the Gibbons and the Macaulays, they had independent means or patronage. Gibbon was a member of Parliament. Macaulay was a colonial administrator in India. The idea of the professional historian supported entirely by a university salary is a twentieth-century blip.
We're actually returning to the historical norm. Historians have always had day jobs.
That's a wonderfully Corn-ish way of putting it, and it's true. Herodotus was a traveler and a storyteller. Thucydides was a failed general. Tacitus was a senator. Ibn Khaldun was a diplomat and a judge. The professional academic historian is the anomaly, not the rule.
Which makes me feel better about the whole situation, honestly. The idea that history is a discipline in crisis because the academic job market is bad misses the deeper point that history as a practice has always been embedded in other institutions. The university was just one host.
It may not be the healthiest host long-term. There's a real argument that academic history has become too insular, too specialized, too concerned with internal debates that nobody outside the discipline cares about. The diaspora into government and museums and corporate work and media may actually be revitalizing the profession by forcing historians to explain why their work matters to people who aren't already convinced.
The insularity point is interesting. I remember reading somewhere that the average academic history monograph sells something like two hundred copies. Is that right?
It's in that range. And those copies are mostly purchased by university libraries, not by individual readers. So you have this situation where a historian spends six years researching and writing a book that maybe a hundred and fifty people will ever read cover to cover.
That's not a communication strategy. That's a message in a bottle.
Yet the work matters. Those monographs are the foundation that the public historians and the journalists and the documentary filmmakers draw on. Without the specialized research on grain distribution in third-century Anatolia, the big sweeping narratives would be floating on air. Montefiore's Jerusalem rests on thousands of monographs he didn't write.
There's an ecosystem. The narrow specialist feeds the synthesizer, the synthesizer feeds the public, and the public, ideally, develops a richer understanding of the past.
The weak link is the synthesizer. There aren't enough of them, and they're not always valued by the profession. Writing for a general audience is sometimes seen as dumbing down, as selling out. Barbara Tuchman won two Pulitzer Prizes and was never fully accepted by the academic establishment because she didn't have a PhD.
Tuchman's The Guns of August is one of the most influential history books of the twentieth century. Kennedy read it during the Cuban Missile Crisis and it shaped his thinking about how great powers stumble into war. That's real-world impact.
She did it without a doctorate, without a university affiliation, working from her home library. She was a journalist and a self-taught historian who just happened to write with extraordinary clarity and narrative drive. The profession didn't quite know what to do with her.
The profession's loss. The public's gain.
And this is where I think the future of the profession is actually quite exciting, despite all the hand-wringing about the academic job market. The demand for historical understanding is enormous. Podcasts, documentaries, historical fiction, museum exhibitions, heritage tourism. People are hungry for the past. They just don't always want it in monograph form.
The medium is the message, and the monograph is a very specific medium.
With very specific affordances. It allows for depth and precision and nuance. It doesn't allow for pacing or emotional engagement or the kind of immersive experience that a documentary or a well-produced podcast can create. Different media for different purposes.
If you're a young historian today, you should be thinking about your work as potentially taking multiple forms. The book, yes, but also the exhibition, the podcast, the digital archive, the walking tour.
That's already happening. There's a historian named Joanne Freeman at Yale who does a podcast about early American history that's reached audiences far beyond her classroom. There are historians on YouTube with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The Royal Historical Society in the UK has been actively encouraging historians to develop public engagement skills.
It's almost like the profession is rediscovering something that was obvious to Herodotus. History is storytelling. If you forget how to tell the story, you lose the audience.
If you lose the audience, you eventually lose the funding, the institutional support, the cultural relevance. The American Historical Association has been sounding this alarm for years. They've published reports showing that history majors are declining at some institutions, that history departments are being merged or cut, that the public increasingly gets its history from non-historians.
From people with YouTube channels and strong opinions and no particular commitment to sourcing.
Which is a real problem. But the solution isn't to complain about the public's ignorance. It's to compete in the marketplace of attention with better, more engaging, more rigorous work.
Competing in the marketplace of attention. That's a very un-tweedy thing to say.
History has always competed in the marketplace of attention. The difference is that for a few decades in the mid-twentieth century, the university provided a protected market where historians didn't have to compete. That protection is eroding, and the profession is having to relearn old skills.
To pull this back to Daniel's original question. Is historian a job? Yes, in more forms than most people realize. Does expertise in history funnel into other paths? Increasingly yes, and that may be a feature, not a bug.
I'd add one more thing. The question assumes that being a historian is a binary identity. You either are one or you aren't. But I think a lot of people who work in other fields carry historical training with them and apply it in ways that don't show up on their job titles. The lawyer who writes historical briefs. The journalist who covers politics with a deep sense of historical context. The diplomat who understands the historical grievances shaping a negotiation. They're doing historical work even if they're not called historians.
The historian as a way of seeing, not just a job description.
And that way of seeing is valuable even, maybe especially, when it's embedded in institutions that don't think of themselves as historical.
The tweedy professor was never the whole story. He was just the most visible character.
The least representative.
Which feels like a good place to land. Though I do want to circle back to Montefiore for a moment, because I think his career path is instructive. He didn't follow the standard academic route. He worked in finance, he worked in journalism, he traveled extensively in the former Soviet Union, and he wrote books that drew on all of those experiences. Jerusalem wouldn't be the book it is if he'd spent his entire career in a university library.
That's a really important point. The book has a kind of worldly quality to it. He's clearly spent time in the places he's writing about. He's talked to people. He understands power because he's been around power. He covered the fall of the Soviet Union as a journalist. That's not the typical CV of a Cambridge history graduate.
There's a lesson there about the value of doing something else before you do history. The best historians often have a prior career that gave them a feel for how institutions actually work, how power actually operates, how people actually behave under pressure.
Thucydides was a general before he was a historian. He wrote about war because he'd commanded men in battle and lost. That experience shaped his entire understanding of what drives human conflict.
You don't get that from a seminar.
You don't. And I think the profession is slowly recognizing this. There's more openness now to non-traditional career paths, to public engagement, to collaboration with journalists and filmmakers and museum professionals. It's not a settled consensus, there's still plenty of snobbery about popularization, but the direction of travel is clear.
The snobbery is probably inevitable. Every profession has its status hierarchies. But the market is what it is, and the market is saying that history matters, just not always in the forms the academy prefers.
The forms the academy prefers are themselves historically contingent. The modern research university is about a hundred and fifty years old. The history PhD as a credential is even younger. These are not eternal institutions. They were created in specific historical circumstances, and they'll evolve or be replaced as circumstances change.
Historians should be good at understanding that, of all people.
You'd think so. But we're as prone to institutional inertia as anyone else.
Alright, let me try to synthesize this for the listener who's been following along. If you love history and you're wondering whether you can make a living at it, the answer is yes, but you should probably think of yourself as someone who does history rather than someone who is a historian in the narrow professional sense. The jobs exist, they're varied, they're often embedded in organizations that don't have history in the name, and they reward people who can bring historical thinking to bear on practical problems.
If you're a reader who just finished Montefiore's Jerusalem and you're wondering what to make of the fact that the author isn't a credentialed academic, the answer is that the credential matters less than the craft. Judge the work by its rigor, its sourcing, its transparency about its own interpretive choices. The PhD is a signal, not a guarantee.
Though the signal does matter in some contexts. I wouldn't want a non-credentialed historian testifying as an expert witness in a court case where the stakes are high and the cross-examination is going to be brutal.
There are contexts where the credential is a necessary shorthand for expertise. But for the general reader trying to understand the history of Jerusalem, Montefiore's book is a legitimate entry point, as long as you read it with the awareness that it's one interpretation among many.
Read it alongside Rashid Khalidi. Read it alongside Karen Armstrong's history of Jerusalem. Read it alongside the primary sources if you have the appetite. History is a conversation, not a pronouncement.
That might be the single most important thing to communicate to the public. History is not a settled body of facts. It's an ongoing argument, and the argument is the point. The disagreements between historians are not a sign that the discipline is broken. They're a sign that it's working.
A discipline without disagreements is a discipline that's stopped asking questions.
Or a discipline that's been captured by an orthodoxy.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the 1920s, a Russian zoologist working on Sakhalin Island documented a species of nudibranch whose defensive mucus contains a compound that temporarily paralyzes the sensory organs of predatory starfish. The compound degrades within seconds of exposure to air, which is why it was never successfully synthesized for study until decades later.
Starfish-paralyzing sea slug mucus. That is a sentence I just heard.
I have no follow-up questions, and I'm at peace with that.
Our thanks as always to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing the show. You can find us at myweirdprompts dot com, and if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. It helps more than you know.
This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Herman Poppleberry.
I'm Corn. Thanks for listening.
