How can I make history a meaningful career? How can activism fit in with history?
koala asked:
I really enjoy history and would love to have a more scholarly career. However, it bothers me that a job history doesn’t really imply a shaping and changing of the future, while I would like to have a more meaningful effect in working towards positive change. What are your opinions on the relevance of history and how it can be meaningful? Are there are any careers you can think of that would combine history and activism? (I am also not so much interested in studying activism)
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I really enjoy history and would love to have a more scholarly career. However, it bothers me that a job history doesn’t really imply a shaping and changing of the future, while I would like to have a more meaningful effect in working towards positive change. What are your opinions on the relevance of history and how it can be meaningful? Are there are any careers you can think of that would combine history and activism? (I am also not so much interested in studying activism)
February 26th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Politician
Lawyer
Judge
Peace Corps to start, to get experience with cultures who are living tomorrow’s history today.
February 28th, 2009 at 9:12 am
There are plenty of would-be activists in the historical profession. They’re the people who go to historical conferences and get on their soapbox. Academics who shriek and cast aspersions on everyone who presents arguments which differ from their own. For all the talk of passion, engagement and social justice that exists in the academy, the fact is that most activists make terrible historians.
Sure, objectivity is impossible. Progress a delusion. But good historians are open-minded give all arguments a fair hearing. And beyond that, if you feel so passionately about certain causes, you’d be miserable in academia. As the last respondent pointed out, activism is far better suited to politics or the law — jobs where your goal goes beyond the presentation and exchange of ideas and toward getting out there and actively trying to change the world.
March 1st, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Well the law and politics are obvious choices, but you can also make a difference in the classroom.
Is there a teacher that ever really moved you? You could be that teacher for the next generation.
And don’t forget that in academia, it’s publish or perish, so you can do quite a bit with writing as well. Wasn’t it the Influence of Sea Power on the War of 1812, by Alfred T. Mahan of Annapolis that eventually led to first our two ocean Navy and later the Panama Canal?
I wouldn’t avoid the study of activism either. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience waited some 60 years before it reached the eye of Mohandas Gandhi and one hundred before it reached Martin Luther King.