'So, what do you do?'
'I'm a historian,' I say.
They make a face. It could hardly be worse if I'd said I was a dentist.
'I hated history so much in high school. And you know? I didn't have to take history at all in college.'"
Ah yes, the question. Otherwise known as the preface to the "what can you do with a history degree" question. In my experience, the revulstion expressed above is less common than the feigned interest followed by the lecture on some point of history. I remember an exchange with a family member on some historical issue.
[Me] "and the historical consensus is such and such."
[relative nodding head thoughtfully] "I don't know if I buy that."
It isn't that the Ph.D. makes me above reproach or means that I know everything. God knows that I don't, and I am more aware of what I don't know than what I do. But what makes non-historians so aware of the issues that they can either accept or reject? Do they talk to the cell biologist the same way? The engineer? Do they engage system administrators on the differing effectiveness of Solaris v. Linux?
Why are they so very ready to reject my interpretation of the American West?
3 comments:
They don't treat others the same way because other fields don't deal so directly with the formative myths about our country and who we are. Historians challenge those mythical assumptions. It's a crappy job, but someone has to do it. --Greg
I think you are right, sadly. The myth is so powerful and they don't want to not have control over that.
You know what may be worse - being an American Indian historian. A guy came to do my gutters yesterday and he asked me what I did. This lead to the eventual revelation of my postion and ethnicity. I told him that I grew up on a reservation in California, and I swear he almost said, "Those aren't real Indians, real Indians are on the Plains."
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