What Makes A Historian

When someone follows me on twitter, I do them the courtesy of looking at their page to see if I might be interested in following back. Sometimes, I'm truly grateful. Not long ago, historian John Fea followed me, and I followed him because of something in his profile: "trying to bring good historical content to twitter." There is plenty of historical BS available, because many people decide on what to accept as truth based on which claim supports what they want to believe. 

That brings me to the point of this post: I don't think most people know what a historian is. I read "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan and "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene, but I don't consider myself to be an astrophysicist. People understand the difference between a scientist, a science writer, and someone who read a couple of popular science books. The same difference applies to history, but anyone who writes a popular history book is considered to be a historian and many people claim to be historians because they watch The History Channel. There are history textbooks that aren't written by historians, although no one would hire someone to write a math textbook based on their credentials as an English teacher. Being a historian isn't about knowing historical facts, but about knowing how to research history. The study of history advances at the college level, in the same way that a PhD program in chemistry is different than taking high school chemistry. 

Having a degree in history is a start, but it isn't a guarantee. Bill O'Reilly has a bachelor of arts degree in history, yet he wrote a book about the historical Jesus that said Jesus came to lower taxes, and his book about Lincoln was so inaccurate that Ford's Theater decided not to sell it. Ideologues make terrible historians. Look for people who are trusted enough in their subject to be employed by a respected university, who do peer reviewed work, and who are not named Niall Ferguson. A person with a history degree who bypasses peer review to publish direct to the public may be doing it because their research won't stand up to scrutiny by people who know sh*t from shinola. 

Also be suspicious of books that are written by someone with the right credentials, but are outside of the author's area of expertise. I recently read "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari, which claims to be a history that stretches from the Big Bang to the present. No one can specialize in that. It reads like something that was intended to sell to people who occupy a wide range of echo chambers. That is great for sales, and five years after it was published it is still #1 on Amazon in the category of History of Civilization and Culture. 

Expertise matters. A journalist who reads a few books about Lincoln and then writes their own book is not a historian. Journalists have the advantage of being far easier to read than most academics, but there are legitimate historians who do a good job of communicating to non-academics.