Impressions from the OAH

25 April 2013 – Michael Adamson

The weekend of 12-14 of April, I took the opportunity to attend the Organization of American Historians meeting San Francisco—a mere 35-mile BART ride from my home—to see how visible public history was on the program one year after the OAH and NCPH held a joint meeting in Milwaukee.

In quantitative terms, I counted nine sessions and two workshops devoted to public history (out of a total of about 80 sessions). The OAH Committee on Public History sponsored a session (a roundtable on filmmaking), a workshop (on doing oral history), and a public history reception at the California Historical Society. The OAH Committee on National Park Service Collaboration also sponsored a session and a workshop. I’m not sure what these metrics mean in terms of recent trends, as this was my first stand-alone OAH meeting since 2002. (I don’t recall a public history presence at that meeting—though I must confess that I didn’t attend it wearing my public history hat.) Let’s stipulate that attention to public history within the OAH has been trending up over the past decade. But in absolute terms, the OAH appears to have invested a meaningful amount of resources in elevating the profile of public history within the organization, if the 2013 meeting is indicative.

I attended sessions on “Real Jobs Outside of Academia for Historians” and “Fundamentals of Doing History in the National Park Service,” both of the aforementioned workshops, and the public history reception. The latter featured wonderful hospitality on the part of Director Anthea Hartig and her staff and a short talk by Jon Christensen, guest curator of the outstanding and important exhibit, “Curating the Bay: Crowdsourcing a New Environmental History,” now on display at CHS through August 25.

The audiences for the sessions and workshops I attended seemed above all keen to learn the mechanics of doing history outside the academy, and the panels responded more than adequately to the demand for this type of information. But each panel also was enriched by participants, both inside and outside of the academy, who ably related their experiences in doing oral history, working with the National Park Service, or whatever, illustrating, among other things, how to get started and what to expect.

That public history is often a supplemental activity was a common theme that emerged across the panels I attended. For example, working on National Park Service contracts isn’t going to be terribly lucrative for anybody. Indeed, it might not even cover the bare essentials of middle-class life. But it can be terribly interesting and rewarding work, and so it may be of particular interest to scholars, both inside and outside the academy, with research interests that intersect with those of the NPS. And there are certain economies of working serially on NPS projects (producing different histories for the same park or generating the same type of report, such as an administrative history, for different parks), and so one might conceivably increase their compensation on an hourly basis across contracts.

Like acting, more than one panel participant advised that one should ease into certain public history activities, such as freelance writing, until one establishes their reputation through a series of successes. In other words, keep your day job until you ramp up.

To be sure, there were embodiments of great gigs in public history at the meeting: U.S. House historian Matt Wasniewski (chair of OAH Public History Committee), for one. But all in all, the panels as a whole hammered home the point that the dynamic of working as a public historian is quite unlike that of working as an academic historian, and demands a different temperament and way of thinking about how to apply a portable set of skills that may be common to all historians.

As least one panelist suggested that public history possibly can be lucrative, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of belief in that proposition among audience members, who were more focused on answering the immediate question, “What am I going to do next?”

On “Plan B”: Duke University’s Peter Sigal, moderator of the “Real Job Outside of Academia” panel, suggested that “Plan B” has been around a long time, but that academic departments are only beginning to acknowledge that they have not been training properly the 1/3 of PhDs who do not get tenure-track jobs or choose non-academic careers. Citing data that showed that the forgotten 1/3 have always been with us, Sigal asked panelists if the idea of a crisis in employment for history PhDs has been overstated. Futurist and business strategist Alex Soojung had the best response (however bleak), arguing that history PhDs are not facing a crisis, because there is no end point: With adjunct positions steadily on the increase, the profession is witnessing the death of a certain type of career, “the end of an empire,” so to speak. Soojung added that PhD candidates looking to work outside the academy shouldn’t wait for their departments to reorient the ship to accommodate their needs, because they aren’t going to do so any time soon, but rather to take the bull by the horns and learn how to leverage the value of what they know and make use of their scholarly resources when searching for jobs or contracts.

Reflecting its mission and membership, the OAH allocated most of the meeting’s space and time to the presentation of the findings of academic research. At the same time, the organization gave public history much more than a token presence, sustaining the support it provides to the subfield between joint OAH-NCPH meetings.