A Popular Historian Looks at Academic Historians
“I Would Never Be Associated with Anything You are Doing”
As I am writing this on a plane, the person in the row in front of me is watching Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark. As a child, I used to think that Ford’s character in that movie was an authentic depiction of a professor who studied the past. Of course, the reality of academia is considerably less romantic, but I always thought that the job of a history or archeology professor sounded attractive.
However, in 2024, the history professors that I follow online paint a picture that sounds apocalyptic. “The humanities are dying,” they say, and “there are no jobs for history professors any more.” Budgets are being cut. The number of newly minted PhDs has dropped by 1/3rd in the last decade, with theses focused on pre-1800 down 80%. Of the research that is out there, the total number of research papers is down, and many of the newer academic journals that the historians publish in are poor quality.
My non academic history loving friends have a whole different list of other issues with university historians. Many topics that are popular in the general public, such as military history, are mostly ignored by academic historians. Academics tend to focus on minutiae, with research coming out of universities on topics with little popular appeal. As always, collaboration outside of history is poor. History, like other parts of academia, is increasingly politicized.
Another complaint about the humanities is that for a researcher to advance in their field, they need to discover and prove new things, and the need to find innovation has been a contributing cause of the academic fraud that has been in the news. It appears that many professors, finding their research didn’t prove something new, have sometimes resorted to falsifying data.
I’m not a historian, but I’ve done archival research and published peer reviewed papers, in collaboration with professors. I found this gloom and doom surprising, and initially couldn’t believe things could be that bad. I thought history would be not only in good shape, but would be doing better than other related fields.
A historian who wants to discover something new has some innate advantages over researchers in many other fields. There are new discoveries in history all of the time, in dusty archives and newly declassified documents. Just last week it was announced that advanced imaging technology was helping scientists read old books that were buried underground by Mt Vesuvius almost 2000 years ago. Historians are increasingly using AI to scan through and analyze documents in a way that a prior generation of researchers would not have believed possible.
Furthermore, history is popular among the general public. Movies such as Oppenheimer, Napoleon, and Killers of the Flower Moon rivaled Barbie at the recent box office. Students want to take history classes. The popularity of history must be a positive for the profession somehow.
Yet, sometimes, the biggest enemy of historians is themselves, in particular, their hostility to popular topics and popular historians. My history book, Beverly Hills Spy, was published this month. In doing the four years of research that led up the book, I connected with perhaps two dozen historians along the way, with dramatically different outcomes. Some were amazing, and helped me uncover previously unknown stories in archives in the US, UK and Japan. Yet others were dramatically unhelpful, or even hostile.
One well known Professor of History replied to my email, beginning by clarifying that everything in his email would be off the record, because he “would never want to be associated with anything you are doing.” He continued “after you told me about your research, I was intrigued, but unfortunately, the draft chapter you sent is frankly, appalling. However, since you asked for feedback, please see the attached on your “Beverly Hills Spy.” Somehow, I felt those quotes he put around my book title were an additional insult.
To my surprise, the professor attached to his email six densely packed pages of notes on the chapter he had agreed to look at for me. His notes were remarkably wordy and argumentative, going far beyond the requested fact checking, mixing in prescriptive notes on the topics of my research, my style, and even explaining how much he disagreed with some quotes I had taken from historical figures.
It seemed likely that the professor was angry I hadn’t written my book in the style of an academic paper, even though, of course, had I written the way he wanted, the book would have been so dry that no one would have wanted to read it. He had written his own books in that style, and practically no one had read them, I assumed.
I don’t have all of the answers, and in fact I still have many questions. However, I do have some thoughts for historians to consider. Perhaps my outside perspective has some nuggets for them. I think the profession should:
Empower historians to study topics that are popular, should they want. Universities should hire and promote a few historians who study and teach topics that are popular with the general student population, including pre 1800. This would increase student enrollment and, at some point, help with funding.
Use the popularity of history to stabilize funding. Universities get funding from wealthy alumni, who often specify what the money is for. Historians could be more aggressive in going after these funds from people who love history. But to do so, they need to be ok with studying things that are popular.
Use new technology. Historians should actively work with providers of advanced technology to develop new insights. As just one example, I could imagine using Generative AI and sentiment analysis on top of old diaries and newspapers to analyze the mentality of a country that is in a depression or a war, or to show the differences in viewpoints by different generations.
Tell stories. People love stories. Give them stories.
Don’t preach, and don’t tell people what to think. Many historians feel their role is to jump into current day politics with an agenda. I don’t think that works really; I don't see that a history professor being quoted at a Thanksgiving dinner table will change any minds. But more fundamentally, I think professors should tell history as it is, objectively, and let students draw their own conclusions.
Address Academic Journals. I first published my research in an academic journal, with some dramatic new revelations about pre-war espionage, and very few people noticed. Many of the answers for academia are obvious. The large academic publishers boast profit margins that rival big tech, so there are resources in the industry to fix.
Universities could therefore:
● Not give air cover to publishers that allow poor quality research or cheating.
● Work with publishers to retract peer reviewed papers with fraudulent data.
● Be open to new, high quality journals; competition would push the existing publishers to keep up.
● Demand peer reviewers are paid, while exhibiting leadership in defining what should be expected from a peer reviewer.
● Encourage publication research in areas that are popular, when it makes sense.
I realize that it is easy for me to throw out ideas from outside, and that execution of new ideas is the hardest part of innovation. But if the history profession is in as bad a shape as it is claimed, now would be a good time to try to fix some of the issues discussed.