History. What Is It Good For? Absolutely -- Something.

Paul Harvey

Especially for you undergrads. and grad. students who read this blog, some thoughts, links, and posts on the job market for historians, and the job possibilities for undergraduate majors in history (happily, the latter appears considerably more open-ended at present).

Tenured Radical asks and offers a number of observations and suggestions on the question, How Should Graduate Schools Respond to the Bad Job Market, a topic that also got a lot of attention at the AHA last week and spurred a classic supply-side versus demand-side discussion (i.e., is the declining academic job market due to decline in demand in relation to supply of PhDs, or is it because that supply-demand imbalance has to do with deliberate university policies, inspired by the corporatization of the university, which have created it? Might it have to do with an "intentional restructuring of demand by administrators?"). The comments are coming in furiously from Tenured Radical's posts, so make sure to follow them as well. A challenge to the conventional narrative comes from Marc Bousquet (author of How the University Works) here.

Then, John Fea (whose blog also covered the AHA extensively) has a fantastic series What Can You Do With A History Major, 17 parts and counting so far, and featuring lots of former history majors who are now in a wide variety of fields, doing just about everything imaginable. This is a series I hope to see awarded a "best series of posts" in some future blogging awards competition; in the meantime, when students ask you that question this semester, you can send them there; and undergraduates reading this blog, do not pass go, just click the link above for some good thoughts on the perennial question of the humanities undergraduate.