Organizing Public History

Abstract

With apologies to Charles Dickens, “It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.”1 It was the mid-1970s, a time of misery and disappointment for hundreds of new PhDs in history in the United States, virtually all of them groomed for college and university teaching, and competing for far too few jobs. But it was also the beginning of public history as a field of graduate history education, a development that would revitalize both the teaching and the practice of the discipline and which continues to expand its horizons to the present day. Public history came into my life in the spring of 1977 when I saw an advertisement in the AHA Newsletter announcing a search for a project coordinator who would staff a new initiative sponsored by the American Historical Association (AHA), the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and several regional and specialized history groups.2 The aim of this new effort was to address what had come to be considered a crisis in the employment market for new PhDs in history – a crisis fueled by unprecedented growth in the number and size of history doctoral education programs created as a part of the expansion of American higher education after World War II. By the mid 1970s, however, that growth in higher education had run its course, ending with a sharp drop in the need for new faculty in history and many other fields. The National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History (NCC), as the new effort was inelegantly named, was meant not only to identify and publicize existing employment opportunities for newly minted PhD historians in and around the academy, but also to explore what were called “non-traditional” positions or “alternative” careers as well. Curious, and in need of employment myself, I sent a letter of application to AHA’s executive director Mack Thompson, landed an interview, and ultimately a job–the best job I ever had because, as it turned out, I had to invent it. Other than the initial job advertisement for a Project Director of the NCC, there was little structure and budget for this position. I was provided decent but modest salary, a desk in a renovated bathroom on the top floor of the American Historical Association headquarters at 400 A Street on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and telephone numbers of several historians in the Washington area who had agreed to chair resource groups in possible employment areas like federal government, state and local government, business, and historic preservation. But what exactly was the problem? Too few jobs? Too many historians? Or historians insufficiently prepared for positions that might actually exist? A book on the shelves of the AHA library yielded a partial answer to the first two questions, and the contacts I had been given for the resource groups shed welcome light on the third. The Education of Historians in the United States, published in 1962, was the work of an AHA Commission on Graduate Education in History, established in 1958 with support from the Carnegie Commission of New York to investigate issues of supply and demand for PhD historians in the near future. Under the leadership of Tulane University historian John Snell the Graduate Education Commission undertook a detailed examination of past production of history doctorates and projected likely needs for the near future, based on population trends. The resulting report was relatively conservative. It did not, for example, advocate for new outside sources of support for graduate study in history, recommending instead that some history departments not currently offering graduate education consider doing so, and calling on existing graduate programs to modestly increase their enrollments.3 Throughout the report, however, the focus was on the PhD as a preparation for college and university teaching, not careers in museums, corporations, archives, government agencies and elsewhere. The lesson it drew, for example, from considering an earlier era of unemployment of young historians during the Great Depression of the 1930s, was simple: “In 1939, probably no more than two-thirds of the history PhDs of 1931–35 were engaged in teaching in universities, colleges, and junior colleges but others would have been teaching if they could have found positions.”4 Clearly the historical professionwas not going to be prepared for what happened in the 1970s, when there were academic job openings for scarcely more than half of new doctorates.