Sampler of Jobs Done by History Majors
A few areas in which history majors work
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Historians as Educators |
Historians as Researchers
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Elementary Schools |
Museums and Historical Organizations |
| Secondary Schools |
Cultural Resources Management |
| Postsecondary Education |
Think Tanks |
Historic Sites and Museums |
Historic Preservation |
| Historians as Communicators
| Historians as Advocates
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| Writers and Editors |
Investigative Journalism, blogging |
| Documentary Editors |
Lawyers and Paralegals |
| Producers of Multimedia Material |
Litigation Support or Staff Work |
| Historians As Information Managers |
Create your own job of the future |
| Foundations |
Jobs not even imagined yet |
| Archivists |
Sky's the limit! |
| Records Managers |
Create your own company |
| Historians in Businesses and Associations |
| Contract Historians |
| Historians for Nonprofit Associations |
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Corporate historians (business records) |
Check out more options from the American Historical Association Careers for Students of History by Constance Schulz, Page Putnam Miller, Aaron Marrs, and Kevin Allen. [Excerpt from the AHA Publication:] The historical method—a systematic approach to solving the problems of the past—is central to the historian's skills. This process involves several key steps, the first of which is phrasing the questions or describing the problem in historical terms.
A consultant hired to write the celebratory centennial history of a religious congregation asks not only, “When was this church or synagogue founded and when was the building built?” but “Who built it? What motivated them to begin this institution? What were their initial goals and purposes? How did they organize to achieve them, and how have those goals and the organization changed over time? What obstacles and disagreements did they encounter, and how did they overcome or solve them? How was this church or synagogue or mosque part of a larger pattern of religious thought, organization, or development in its time and place?”
A corporate historian asks not only, “Who founded this company, and what were its products or policies fifty years ago?” but “How was the organization structured in order to develop policies or products? To whom were these marketed and how successful was the campaign? Who were the company's principal competitors? How did it enter into competition against them? How have its successful products changed over time, and what technologies or decision-making processes were used to make those changes? What was the internal or external economic or political climate which enabled those changes to succeed, or caused them to fail?”
In answering such questions or solving specific historical problems, the second critical skill historians bring to the study of the past is the understanding that any historical problem or question has a larger context. Historians are concerned with two types of context. The historical context addresses how a particular event or issue from the past was part of a chain of events, or how it fit into a web of connected issues specific to the time or place under consideration. The historiographical context refers to the way earlier historians framed a problem or question about the past. History is produced by study and interpretation, so we can learn from the questions asked by our predecessors and by considering how the answers they provided shifted and changed over time.
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