History’s postmodern fates

As the twenty-first century begins, history occupies a unique, but not an enviable, position among the humanistic disciplines in the United States. Every time Clio examines her reflection in the magic mirror of public opinion, more voices ring out, shouting that she is the ugliest Muse of all. High school students rate history their most boring subject. Undergraduates have fled the field with the enthusiasm of rats leaving a sinking ship. Thirty years ago, some 5 percent of all undergraduates majored in history. Nowadays, around 2 percent do so. Numbers of new Ph.D.s have risen, from a low of just under five hundred per year in the mid-1980s to almost one thousand now. But the vision of a rise in the number of tenure-track jobs that William Bowen and others evoked, and that lured many young men and women into graduate school in the 1990s, has never materialized in history. The market, accordingly, seems out of joint–almost as badly so as in the years around 1970, when production of Ph.D.s first reached one thousand or more per year just as universities and colleges went into economic crisis. Many unemployed holders of doctorates in history hold their teachers and universities responsible for years of oppression, misery, and wasted effort that cannot be usefully reapplied in other careers.1

Those who succeed in obtaining tenure-track positions, moreover, may still find themselves walking a stony path. Historians’ salaries, like most of those in the humanities, are low. So, more surprisingly, are history book sales–except in some favored fields, like Holocaust studies. Some university presses have cut back in fields of history vital not only to scholarship but also to American national interests–the history of Latin America, for example–because even the best monographs sell barely a hundred copies and thus fail to cover their costs. Very strong books, it seems, still find publishers even when sales will be low. But the general picture is dark.

.  .  .