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Careers for Students of History
An Introduction
Skills of the Professional Historian
The Importance of Professional Associations
The Structure of this Publication

“What can I do with a major in history?” Career counselors, job fairs, and even college faculty are full of advice about the many careers open to students who are contemplating or have completed an undergraduate major in history. While all that advice can be valuable, it does not address or answer a quite different question that many students who have chosen history as a major or minor may ask: what careers are open to me if I want to be an historian? Such students see the study of history not as part of a general education preparing them to be something else, but as a discipline and a profession with interests, skills, and methods in which they wish to be engaged. This booklet is for those who want to do history. We hope that it will provide you with guidance to help you reach that goal.
In the following chapters, we try to demonstrate the range of jobs in which you might enter the historical profession as an ongoing career. You can apply your history degree in a variety of workplaces and under a variety of job titles, including educator, researcher, writer, editor, information manager, advocate, businessperson, or simply as a history professional. Professional historians need diverse skills because they often carry out multiple historical activities in any particular workplace. Historians in museums manage and interpret collections of objects but are also called upon to serve as researchers, writers, editors, and educators. Similarly, archivists trained as historians will process and protect collections of historical source materials, but also need to research, educate, write, edit, and provide advocacy information. We examine careers for historians in a variety of workplaces, briefly describe some of the varied activities you might be called upon to perform, and assess the type of training and preparation you will need for a successful career in the field.
Skills of the Professional Historian
Historians possess a number of skills that help to define them as members of the profession. Some are unique to historians while others are shared with or similar to those practiced in other disciplines that study the past, such as archaeology, art history, literature, historical geography, and folklore. Increasingly, historians find themselves working across disciplines, either as part of a team of people drawn from many fields or by adapting methods drawn from other disciplines for their individual research. So what is it that professional historians do that makes them historians? What are the skills they bring into the varied workplaces that hire them as historians? Fundamentally, historians attempt to answer important questions about past human activity and experience, to share the answers they discover and develop with others, and to explain the relevance of those findings for the benefit of contemporary society.