Earlier this month, I called for a symposium on the topic "What Is a Historian?" Here's what I asked then:

what exactly is a historian? Should the term be applied only to those who possess doctoral degrees and publishing histories, or are historians a more broad and multifaceted group? Is everyone a historian, as Carl Becker famously argued? And assuming we can define the "wheat" and the "chaff," what separates the two? What does the "trained" historian have to offer that the "amateur" does not, or vice versa?

While the response to this call-for-symposium wasn't enormous, the few of you who did respond did admirably, raising a number of important issues. Here are the responses:

- iampunha, Historians and Storytellers
- Mark Safranski, On Historians and Others....
- Jeremy Young, Historians and the Gospel of Professionalism
- Jeremy Young, Toward a "History that Does Work in the World"

Over the flip, some choice quotes (but you really should read the contributions in their entirety!).

at a certain point, each historian above stops being a historian and starts being a storyteller. That point is reached when telling a good story becomes more important than telling the whole story.

A historian is someone who uses the scientific method in researching and writing about history. The method can be drawn out or span a second's thought. ...

I tell stories that are as factual as I can make them and as complete as I think is interesting (details can make stories more interesting, but they can also bog you down in trivialities and result in your waving goodbye to any sense of your narrative's flow). And that makes me a storyteller. Not a historian except on the third-year history major level. Sure, I use the scientific method, but I test my hypothesis for an hour or three, not weeks, and against what documents I can find online and in my apartment, not source documents from 1324 or Malaysia.

I'm a storyteller. And I prefer things that way.

-- iampunha

The relationship between academic and popular/amateur historians is an interdependent one; the former are usually creating the monographic bricks with which the latter build their sweeping and entertaining literary edifices while popular historians "hook" readers into studying history more deeply - perhaps deeply enough to become a professional historian! One is not "better" than the other, simply different with distinct objectives.

The door of history is open to anyone - you simply need to walk through it.

-- Mark Safranski

Academic historians often write better books than non-academics because we have assets that they don't: years of time to spend reading and teaching scholarly works and digging in archives, advice and support from other historians, and steady jobs that insist that we publish or perish (as opposed to amateur historians, for whom publishing often means perishing). Give an amateur historian the same tools as a professional, and he or she will likely do as well if not better; many amateurs do just fine without them.

Given this insight, I see no reason for professional historians to lord it over amateurs or to dispute their credentials on the basis of their formal education. The gospel of professionalism many historians preach is merely an academic flim-flam designed to discredit those who lack formal training without considering the value of their work. Review a book, whether scholarly or non-scholarly, on its merits -- but don't discount it because its author has no training, or venerate it because its author graduated from an Ivy. Likewise, there's no point in declaring that someone is "not a historian" simply because he or she lacks a doctorate in history. A historian is anyone who writes about history in a public forum -- it's that simple.

-- Jeremy Young

Labels: Jeremy Young, Symposium

Previously, Jeremy Young, our primus inter pares, called for a symposium on the question of what is a historian:

The argument we're (not quite) having here -- and to which Adam
Hochschild in Historically Speaking makes another important
contribution -- concerns a series of rich and timeless questions: what exactly is a historian? Should the term be applied only to those who possess doctoral degrees and publishing histories, or are historians a more broad and multifaceted group? Is everyone a historian, as Carl Becker famously argued? And assuming we can define the "wheat" and the "chaff," what separates the two? What does the "trained" historian have to offer that the "amateur" does not, or vice versa?

Good questions all. Let me start with what historians are not.

Historians are not theorists, though they may entertain certain theories in the course of interpreting an event they do not begin with answers as does a theorist but with questions. Questions they try to answer with research and evidence because history, while not a science, is an empirical discipline. Historians are not poets, they do not aim to create sweeping, romantic, myths, though like anyone else, historians admire mythic ideals but their task is to reveal where reality may have fallen short. Historians are not social scientists, though they sometimes borrow their tools; nor are they economists constructing abstract models hoping to predict events. A historian who tries to predict what will happen based upon the past is engaging in futurism, a very different and more difficult art.

None of this is meant to disparage political scientists, poets, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, authors of historical fiction or futurists. They all do worthy and interesting things, it's just that their work cannot properly be called "history". A historian is someone who tries to cogently explain what really happened, based upon the best evidence available; amateur or professional status matters less than skill, persistence and intellectual integrity in pursuing this task.


Historians have a varied set of skills. They are researchers, at times, detectives. They must consume and accurately recall vast amounts of historigraphical literature. Historians must think analytically foremost but also intuitively and sometimes, toward a synthesis. They must communicate clearly with the spoken and written word; and they must be teachers, literally in a classroom or in the larger sense of writing history to educate society. Few historians excel equally well at all of these different aspects but most good historians are strong or even exemplary in many of them.

In regard to the respective virtues of professional vs. "amateur" or "popular" historians ( many popular historians are or were also academics - Howard Zinn, Stephen Ambrose, Niall Ferguson and so on) it is important to recognize that they write for different audiences. Popular or amateur historians write for the intelligent reading public while academic historians write primarily for other academic historians. This is not a slam on profesional scholars but a recognition of differences in scope, scale and level of historical knowledge between the two groups of readers.

The public is not well prepared to handle or comment upon historical monographs of an esoteric or technical nature, only other specialists can do that. Nor are historians who have spent most of their career in a very rarefied subfield - say researching currency fluctuations in the Spanish Netherlands during the early modern period or Women's social status in the Caribbean during the late Colonial era - well positioned to write a panoramic history of Western civilization, of the history of technology or similarly big picture subjects desired by the layman who wants to "read some history". At least not without a major time investment.

The relationship between academic and popular/amateur historians is an interdependent one; the former are usually creating the monographic bricks with which the latter build their sweeping and entertaining literary edifices while popular historians "hook" readers into studying history more deeply - perhaps deeply enough to become a professional historian! One is not "better" than the other, simply different with distinct objectives.

The door of history is open to anyone - you simply need to walk through it.

Labels: Academic history, History, Jeremy Young, Mark Safranski, Popular history, Symposium

In a comment last night on Mark's excellent post, I made a radical statement regarding the uniqueness of the historian's craft: there isn't any.

No matter what our training, we all have experience constructing narratives, searching out facts, and analyzing present actions in light of past events. The truth is, armed with the data and experience we historians have gathered over time, quite a lot of people could do as well as, if not better than, many trained historians at constructing useful historical analyses. (That's one reason I value "amateur" and "popular" historians so highly; I don't see their lack of formal training as any impediment to their creating meaningful scholarship.)

In a post today at his own blog regarding Senator Jim Webb's historical inaccuracies about the Confederacy, my co-blogger Kevin Levin made a somewhat different argument:

Webb reminded me why I don't consider him to be a historian, although he identified himself as one during the interview. ... Sorry, but this kind of simplicity no longer cuts it in more serious circles. You can't call yourself a historian when all you can do is fall back on the same tired one-liners that are in every neo-Confederate's playbook. You need to read books by Jim McPherson, Joe Glatthaar, Jason Phillips, and Chandra Manning to even begin to approach these complex questions. Webb identifying himself as a historian is like me identifying myself as a chef when all I can do is prepare TV Dinners or [now your turn] identifying yourself as _____________ when all you can do is __________.

The argument we're (not quite) having here -- and to which Adam Hochschild in Historically Speaking makes another important contribution -- concerns a series of rich and timeless questions: what exactly is a historian? Should the term be applied only to those who possess doctoral degrees and publishing histories, or are historians a more broad and multifaceted group? Is everyone a historian, as Carl Becker famously argued? And assuming we can define the "wheat" and the "chaff," what separates the two? What does the "trained" historian have to offer that the "amateur" does not, or vice versa?

The questions above merit further discussion -- and I propose to facilitate it in the form of a summer symposium here at ProgressiveHistorians. We'll be following the same model we did last time, and that Cliopatria, from whom we shamelessly stole the idea, has done many times in the past. The rules are as follows: write a response to the bolded prompts above. If you're a contributor at ProgressiveHistorians, post your contribution here [edit: as a stand-alone post, not as a comment in this thread] and I'll link to it in the official symposium post. If not, post your response at your own blog and let me know by e-mail that you've done so; I'll include a link and an excerpt in the official post as well.

Given that I've got to put together another History Carnival at the end of the month, I'll have to move up the due date for this further than I'd like. Your deadline, then, is by the end of the day on Monday, June 23. I'll try to get the symposium posted within the ensuing couple of days.

Happy writing -- and please spread the word!

Labels: Jeremy Young, Symposium