December 2015
Robert B. Townsend | Perspectives on History
Attend almost any reception at the AHA annual meeting, and you are likely to hear someone complain that their subject area is unusually beleaguered in the discipline—suffering from shrinking ranks and limited job opportunities. But are these mere anecdotal impressions or accurate perceptions of changing realities in the discipline?
Click on the image to enlarge.
A survey of 40 years of field specializations confirms the impression among some (such as specialists in European and intellectual history) that their specialties are losing ground in the discipline, while also demonstrating the gains of many other fields on long trajectories of growth in the discipline (such as women’s history and histories of parts of the world outside the Northern Hemisphere) and those rising quickly in recent years (specialties in history of the environment and sexuality).
The listings of US history faculty in the AHA’s Directory of History Departments, Historical Organizations, and Historians(previously the Guide to Departments of History) offer a window on the specializations of historians—albeit primarily at four-year colleges and universities—for four decades.1 Even if a tabulation of the specializations used to designate faculty over that span cannot explain why particular fields may be rising or falling, much less changes in the underlying meanings of particular labels and relationships between fields, a textual analysis of the faculty listings can at least provide a measure of the changes and a basis for further self-examination (if not angst).
