Where have all the Historians Gone?

Raymond W. Smock

In some circles historians are called "content providers." Television producers call us "the talent." In the federal government there is a disturbing trend to call us something besides historians. We become resource managers, archivists, interpreters, and librarians, all legitimate and worthy careers, to be sure, but in this new vocabulary history and historians get lost, transformed, and sometimes demeaned. This willingness of some federal employers of historians to rename the profession is troubling from several standpoints. While we may take this as a positive sign that historians are versatile and can fill a variety of professional jobs, the darker side of the equation suggests that the profession is antiquated and needs new labels to define what we do for a living. It also suggests that historians do not perform valuable services when they function as historians, and only meet the needs of an agency when they are called something else. This administrative word game has real consequences for those seeking careers as historians in the federal government. It also has real consequences for the future of how we define the historical profession and how we train historians.

Agencies such as the Library of Congress and the National Archives tend to classify jobs by a narrow definition of what that agency does. At the Library of Congress there is a growing tendency to rename positions held by historians and call them librarians instead. The National Archives likewise calls their historically-trained employees archivists. On one level it makes sense. Congressional appropriators may find it easier to fund positions for librarians at the Library of Congress and archivists at the National Archives, while agency heads may find it harder to justify why the Library or the Archives needs historians. For years many of us have complained that the National Archives has moved away from hiring historians who are specialists in various areas of the Archives' holdings and has opted instead for management skills over content knowledge. The complex issues surrounding the management of rapidly expanding digital archives only increases the demand for managers of content knowledge.

All too often the history profession is the last to hear about the good jobs that exist for historians within the federal government. Some agencies seeking them fail to post their positions where historians are likely to see them. And, conversely, historians who rely solely on professional newsletters or sources like the Chronicle of Higher Education, will miss some federal listings unless they go beyond the usual sources of information or the usual practice of looking for jobs in the "history" category.

Thanks to Bruce Craig, the director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, historians learned that the State Department was seeking a new Director of the Office of Historian to replace the retiring William Slany, a distinguished senior position with pay ranging up to $130,000 annually. The State Department did not bother to announce this position in any of the professional history newsletters. Craig managed to post the job in the NCC's Washington Update (Vol. 6, no. 23, 12 July 2000), and it was circulated to various history lists via the Internet. Likewise, Craig was first to inform the history profession that the Library of Congress was seeking two senior historians for top, well-paying positions that were classified as librarians, not as historians. (Vol. 6, no. 22, 30 June 2000).

Government agencies seeking the best historical talent available should take the small extra effort to reach professional historians through the pages of the professional newsletters such as those of the OAH and AHA and on major websites (such as H-Net) which reach a wide audience of professional historians. While some agencies, such as the Smithsonian Institution, have a good track record of posting jobs for historians ( i.e., curators) where historians are likely to read them, others do not.

Agencies with strong historical programs such as the National Park Service do the bulk of their job postings on the federal employment website USAJobs (<http://www.usajobs.opm. gov/>) rather than posting in places likely to reach a larger pool of historical talent.

Historians familiar with government job classifications know that the usual place to look for historical positions on USAJobs is in the 0170 series. This does not help, however, if the historical position is listed under the librarian classification (1410), or a dozen other classifications for museum curators, park rangers, archivists, document analysts, exhibit specialists, to name a few. In addition to the classification system, the separate Senior Executive Service (SES) found on USAJobs, might contain an occasional top job for a historian.

In the Information Age, too, many government administrators are making the mistake of assuming that all information is created equal and that all information managers are also created equal. Modern technology, so the thinking goes, provides easy access to a new universe of digital information without the need for specialists to act as intermediaries or interpreters for "end users." In this utopian digital world, all citizens will have equal access to government documents and this democratization of information means "Everyman his own Historian," to borrow a phrase from Carl Becker's 1931 AHA presidential address, conceived long before the Internet gave a perverse new meaning to it.

It will be up to historians--miners of the historical archives of the nation--whether we have to journey to archival depositories and libraries and sort through paper or whether we access electronic data via the Internet or other means. It will be professional historians who help school teachers and the public to make sense of vast quantities of paper and electronic records that will be at their disposal. What school teacher has the time to look at thousands of pictures of the Civil War when they need only a handful of important authentic images for their classes? They will continue to rely on the history profession for guidance. As Ernest May and Richard Neustadt pointed out in their classic study Thinking in Time, government decision makers desperately need the benefit of professional historical analysis to avoid the blunders of making national policy based on half-baked historical analogies.

It is time for the history profession to take a hard look at this trend in government to ignore the profession by renaming it. Historians should decide if this is a harbinger of a serious problem that will have dire consequences for the job prospects of future historians and what effect this name game will have on the very nature of the profession itself.

Raymond W. Smock, former Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives, is a freelance historian and vice president of the Society for History in the Federal Government.