THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL Association recently asked social media users to vote on a slogan for its annual meeting, from a shortlist which included “I’m a historian. I’m here to help” and “Study the past to understand the present.” A better one might have read, “Where did the jobs go?” The number of full-time, permanent posts in history across the United States has fallen from over 150 a year to just under a hundred in the past ten years.
When combined with fading student enrolments, the withdrawal of major philanthropic trusts from funding research and the explosion of rows within the AHA over “presentist” approaches to scholarship, these statistics prompted one New York Times editorialist to wonder if the end of history was nigh.
The nosedive in the discipline’s fortunes may yet level off to a glide, but it has been dramatic enough to provoke American historians, even comfortably-tenured ones, to brood on possible course corrections. When it comes to the past, historians
