History from the Outside In
At the American Historical Association’s annual meeting, the margins are the new center.
I attended the 2023 annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Philadelphia expecting to feel like an anthropologist observing an exotic subculture into which she would never blend, despite having studied its idiosyncrasies for years. With a history Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, I was on my home turf in more ways than one. But between my interdisciplinary research interests, my teaching experience (never on the tenure track), and my career shift toward digital archives and public humanities, I’ve often felt like I’m working at the margins of the historical profession, never on the same wavelength as the prototypical AHA attendee. This year, it was clear that I wasn’t alone.
Historians engaging in collaborative public-facing projects, as well as historians based outside of academic history departments, turned out in droves. Many of them publicly questioned whether they belonged at the AHA, whether this was the right venue for their ideas, and whether anyone was taking their work seriously. Those fears proved to be unfounded: there were enough historians working at the “edges” of the profession to create a sense of community that eclipsed the traditional center of the meeting. Because the work of many of these historians forces them to consider design and curation choices, translate nuanced ideas for a non-specialist audience, and regularly advocate for the humanities, they are particularly well situated to articulate the value and possibilities of the discipline. Throughout the weekend, we grappled with the challenges and opportunities that lay at the very heart of the profession.
Lincoln Mullen, a computational historian at George Mason University, noted that what distinguishes history from other disciplines is that historians will “look at anything, and we’ll look at it in any way possible.” This is a strength of the discipline for sure — it affords historians flexibility to ask timely questions, recognize overlooked sources, and find new meanings in familiar materials. It also poses a challenge: with such a broad definition, how should we define what counts as historical work, how can we identify who is an historian, and how can an organization like the AHA be a community of practice for us?
In the absence of clear answers to the first two questions, this year’s conference addressed the third by focusing on the historian’s craft — the processes and methods that are relevant for all historians. Looking back through the program, I counted 30 sessions on pedagogy, 15 on the profession and its labor within institutions, and 23 on historical practice that is public, digital, or collaborative with other professions such as journalism or archival work. Allison Finkelstein, a historian at Arlington National Cemetery, pointed out that most of these sessions were roundtables or workshops, a format that invited all attendees to contribute to dynamic and probing discussions.
Yoni Applebaum, history professor-turned-deputy editor of The Atlantic, identified another paradoxical strength and challenge of the profession: its accessibility to non-specialists. “History is the only discipline where primary works of scholarship are also picked up by people at the airport,” he pointed out. But that very “legibility” hides the labor of historical research and interpretation, and journalists tend to “evoke the historian as oracle” or cite “disembodied fact.” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out that this happens in both directions. Because “history and journalism feel like cousins,” he said, practitioners approach each other’s output as so “straightforward” that they often see it as “just the raw materials” of their own work. Historians cite facts from newspaper and magazine articles without acknowledging the research and interpretive work of journalists.
Throughout the conference, there was much discussion about what historians in academia and professionals in other careers can learn from each other’s styles and habits of mind. Many panelists and audience members revealed themselves to have backgrounds that straddled professions: journalists who became historians and historians who became journalists, teachers pursuing graduate degrees in history and historians developing K-12 course materials, historians who work as archivists and park interpreters and editors and filmmakers, the list goes on. The next step, clearly, will be to figure out how to build collaborative relationships across professional boundaries.
Archivists and museum curators should also have a place in the conversation about collaboration and credit, as their labor and interpretive decisions are regularly overlooked. New American History founder Ed Ayers reminded the attendees of one panel that “we’re all using more digital tools than we admit — our citation conventions bury that” when we note the original source but not the archive or database that allowed us to encounter it. To become an archive, he argued, a collection of materials must be described and organized in ways that allow people to use them. If “history is making sense of too much information,” an archive must be “too capacious for any one purpose” but usable for many different questions asked of it. Expansive, well-curated archives — and broad access to them — are important because for historians, students, and general readers seeking to be informed citizens, “everything is context for everything else.”
That framing can apply not just to historians’ sources, but also to our jobs. Although we all practice many of the same habits of mind, we do so in the context of different workflows, administrative structures, conventions and constraints, and norms of evaluation. A recurring theme across the meeting was that the more we know about how others work, the better we will be at working together. To this end, Lauran Kerr-Heraly, a professor at Houston Community College, talked about designing effective group projects for a student body juggling work and family obligations. Applebaum described the process and timeline of seeking submissions, and suggested universities and publishers could reach a public audience more efficiently if they promoted new findings through press releases in the way the sciences do. Finkelstein, who works within the command structure of the U.S. Army, discussed the tension between “numbers” and “impact”: relying on analytics to determine “reach is important — how many times articles are shared,” but part of the government’s responsibility is to share resources about all the groups represented in American history, and inclusion of something different may ultimately have a greater effect than another piece about something that’s already popular.
The AHA conference traditionally has been the site of job interviews for professorships. Forefront in historians’ minds this year was the AHA’s survey finding that only 10% of people who earned Ph.Ds in history between 2019 and 2020 now hold full-time history faculty positions. There were many discussions about the strain on academic departments and contingent faculty, and the structural remedies needed to stabilize academe. Many historians have begun to acknowledge the need to embrace digital tools, increase public engagement, and collaborate with other disciplines to better serve students and for the overall health and survival of the humanities. Yet, the onus for doing so remains on the individual, with little guidance for how historians can forge careers outside academic departments, or how those within them can integrate these activities into their work.
The AHA’s increasing recognition of a broader community of practicing historians finally yielded a critical mass of participants at the 2023 meeting who could begin to shift from thinking anecdotally to thinking systematically about what history looks like beyond the ivory tower. Finkelstein’s roundtable suggested that the next step should be a more inclusive definition of scholarship, one that encompasses not just new knowledge but also new interpretations, including popular writing, teaching resources, television interviews, and podcasts. Historians, then, need to educate the public and their colleagues about what that scholarship is, how to support and evaluate it, and how to do more of it. Contrary to the received wisdom that for every historian an essayist mentions, she loses half her readers, Bouie insists that the popular press can be a venue for this sort of education. “Readers are interested in the historians, the sources, the historiography. They’re curious.”
If this weekend’s conference was any indication, so are other historians. Many working outside of traditional academic departments are frequently the only historians in their shops, and they thrive on collaboration within and across professional contexts. Plus, due to their institutional positions and their audiences, they have thoughtful insights on issues central to the craft. Collectively, they possess the knowledge, skills, and reach to guide the profession as a whole through many of the challenges it is facing, and the AHA has the opportunity to provide a space for this intellectual exchange. As long as we can keep this conversation going, I look forward to seeing my fellow historian-practitioners in San Francisco next January.
