Amanda Seligman: Growing Into Teaching Career Diversity for Historians

by Amanda Seligman

Teaching Career Diversity undid my ancient assumption that a PhD in the humanities should lead to a professorship. 

Number of history majors decline; lowest level in ten years

Robert Townsend is the AHA’s deputy director, and the author of History’s Babel: Scholarship, Professionalization, and the Historical Enterprise, 1880–1940 (Univ. of Chicago Press).During the 2010–11 academic year, the number of undergraduate students earning degrees in history dropped—albeit by a small percentage—for the first time in a decade, even as the number of students earning degrees in all fields continued to rise. As a result, the history discipline's share of degrees earned in 2011 declined to the lowest level in 10 years (fig. 1).According to new information from the Department of Education, history programs conferred 35,059 bachelor's degrees in the discipline, and another 3,588 students earned degrees with history as their second major. Together, 0.6 percent fewer students earned history degrees this year compared to last.1

Exclusive content from AHA online earlier than expected

Allen Mikaelian is editor of the AHA magazine Perspectives on History.Responding to the high level of interest in the article on History Harvests in Perspectives on History, we are opening it to all readers ahead of schedule.William G. Thomas, Patrick D. Jones (both of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln), and Andrew Witmer (James Madison University) describe the History Harvest as “exciting and rewarding work at the intersection of digital history and experiential learning.” History Harvests are “community events in which students scan or photograph items of historical interest, brought in by local institutions and residents, for online display.”“Every family and community has a history,” the authors explain, “a connection to the larger story of the American experience, and in the History Harvest we explore those connections, talk about them, and document their meaning in partnership with the participants. Our aim is to make invisible archives and stories more visible, bringing them into the public realm to be shared, heard, and seen.”