I think it’s also getting more popular in part because the big professional organizations (OAH and AHA) have made concerted efforts over the past decade to promote public history and to erase any lasting snobbery against public history & public historians (the idea that PH was mere vocational training, versus the “real” “intellectual” work of academic history & historians.) Finally it seems like people are listening.

But, as I’ve argued here repeatedly, historians do nuance, and nuance isn’t really appreciated outside of history. (At least it’s not what they’re looking for instrumentally in law, politics, policy, etc.) So what, precisely, is the point of us, I wonder sometimes?

I worked for eleven months during grad school for a small boutique law firm, almost entirely on one case, doing things as mundane as moving boxes and being yelled at to bird-dogging events at public agency meetings relevant to the case to more traditional kinds of research. The guy who I primarily bird-dogged for, a smart but tempermental and fairly disorganized litigator who had gotten an MA in history before going to law school, did me the great favor of always introducing me to people, high and low, as “a historian who’s doing some work for us,” rather than “a guy who never moves the right boxes in the right order at just the right time…,” and I always appreciated that.

Our grads are working in history & natural history museums, house museums, archives, historical societies, and in a variety of capacities for the U.S. government (National Parks Service, National Forest Service, etc., plus many agencies keep their own archives & so choose to employ archivists & historians, too.) In fact, I’m sure that if we include people who teach at state universities, the U.S. & state governments combined employ more historians than any other entity.