Public History, Grim News, and Historical Views

Abstract

This issue of The Public Historian comes to you as scholarly documents of another sort are delivered to hundreds of other historians, nearly as many as will receive this journal. Those other documents are doctoral diplomas, around eight hundred of them in the U.S. alone this spring. Their conferral might give heart to us all that the profession continues to attract and train bright new recruits, if not for the plunge in the number of jobs in higher education that awaits their recipients. The recent issue of the AHA’s Perspectives on History reports that the past year brought a sharp drop in academic jobs. The AHA anticipates more of the same this year, as the number of those completing Ph.D.s in history rises (Robert Townsend, “GrimYear on the Academic Job Market for Historians,” Perspectives, January 2010). Those trends will sound familiar to the generation of you who remember a similar job crisis in the 1970s–80s. Even thosewho didn’t live through that period know a bit about its significance to our field: it was amid the difficulties of that moment thirty years ago that “public history” came to be. The exact nature of the relationship between the job crisis and the establishment of the new field is subject to different views. For some founders of the field, the correlation of crisis and reinvention of the profession was strong; for others, a different set of motives inspired “going public.” Whatever the relative contribution at the time, the association of public history with crisis employment seems to have stuck, carrying through to this day. If higher edu-