So You Think You Want to Be a Historian – The Historian Party

Every winter, thousands of historians migrate to a major US city for what’s known officially as the American Historical Association’s Annual Meeting, and unofficially (which is to say, by me) as the Historian Party. If you are a historian or are intending to become one, this annual migration will become an important part of your year, and its characteristics are therefore worth examining in some detail.

If you travel to the Historian Party, which you will do only if you have a paper to present or a job for which to interview – and for no other conceivable reason whatsoever – you will immediately notice that historians look an awful lot like historians. Indeed, a Martian visitor alighting from his or her flying saucer in the midst of the Historian Party would, without much trouble at all, quickly surmise that he or she (or it) was in the midst of a gathering of historians. This Martian would not for one minute, for instance, imagine that he or she (or it) had happened upon a Shriners convention, or a gastroenterologists conference, or even (though this may surprise you) a Philosopher Party, so much do historians look like historians. They are, on the whole, a beardy, scarfy, cardigany lot (I’m talking here about historians, not Martians), although their cardigans and scarves (if not their beards) are often draped in long black woolen coats. This is because the gathering always happens in early January, usually in cities where the only way to remain warm is to wear a long black woolen coat. Indeed, any bright colors you may spot during the Historian Party are almost certain to belong not to historians but to interlopers such as book reps, spouses, or the janitorial staff.

The uniformity of the historians’ uniforms can make it difficult for the uninitiated to differentiate amongst them, but a practiced observer can easily spot subtle differences. The following guidelines may help you identify some of the more common types of historians you are likely to encounter:

1) A historian wearing a bowtie is almost certainly a diplomatic or military historian, and his (it will always be a him) area of expertise will be 20th-century America.

2) Many, many historians will have freshly-shaved, shiny bald heads, and they will be wearing thick-rimmed glasses. These will almost always be male, and, though you may initially assume that they are gay, they are not. They will, however, specialize in intellectual history and/or gender history, with a particular interest in the history of the family.

3) There will also be women at the Historian Party, of course, whom you will be able to spot by their longish hair and distinctive lack of necktie. In fact, many of these women will be stylish, charming, and coolly self-possessed, although they will look slightly bewildered by the beardy commotion around them. All of these women specialize in the women’s suffrage movement in Britain and America.

4) You will encounter many youngish people (late 20s, early 30s) who are dressed in 3-piece suits and resemble funeral parlor directors. They will probably be fidgety and sweaty, and they will invariably be talking to themselves. These are job candidates, and you would be wise to steer clear of them.

5) Finally, you will encounter a very, very small number of historians who appear to be of a race other than Caucasian. Do not be alarmed – these historians study minor, out-of-the-way places that you don’t know or care about, like Asia, Africa, and South America, and you will never have any reason to talk with them about anything.

Once you know what to expect, a fun game you can play even before you arrive at the Historian Party – at the train station, say, or at the airport – is “Spot the Historian,” which is exactly what it sounds like. In addition to their distinctive uniforms, you can spot historians by the volume of their voices (historians usually talk quite loudly), their tendency to speak in full paragraphs (any historian who began talking when you started reading this post, for example, would only now be wrapping up his/her thesis statement), and their slightly bewildered look, as if they weren’t expecting the world outside to be quite this brightly lit.

On arriving at the Historian Party be sure to obtain your $170 name tag and program, and then think about how you’re going to apportion your time. You may be tempted to join one of the many historic walking tours promoted by the Local Arrangements Committee, but you will quickly learn that all of the available spots have already been claimed, and so you will just have to learn about “Tenement Life in 1870s New York” or “Lincoln’s Washington, DC” in some other way. Glancing through your program, you will notice many, many “panels” taking place throughout the four days of the conference. Most of these “panels” will be devoted to topics that are clearly of pressing concern to someone, but probably not to you. They will have titles like: “The Influence of the Levellers’ Social Radicalism on John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government” or “A Long Decline?: the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century.” Those “panels” not devoted to specific historical topics will be concerned with professional navel-gazing (note: these may also misleadingly be called “roundtables”), and they will have titles like: “Are There Too Few Minorities in the Historical Profession?” (answer: yes) or “Teaching European History in a Global Age.” You will note that many of these “panels” and “roundtables” are scheduled to take place simultaneously, and so you will, unfortunately, be unable to attend them all. You will have to choose, so choose wisely. And note that the only three “panels” that really interest you will invariably be scheduled to take place at the same time as one another. Try to avoid the temptation to kick something.

Let’s say you’ve decided to attend a “panel” on your first afternoon at the Historian Party. What can you expect to see? You will see a small hotel conference room with 3-4 people seated at the front of the room behind a long table, and 3-4 people seated in the audience in chairs facing the table. The speakers will be introduced by someone who clearly just met them all a few moments before, and then one by one they will stand at a podium and read a 10-12 page paper to you. Let me repeat: they will read a paper to you. One after the other, 20 minutes at a time, with minimal ad-libbing or improvising. If you’re lucky, they’ll look up from the podium from time to time. After an hour of this the room will be open to questions, during which bearded men in cardigans will ask questions of the panelists that, though masquerading as questions about the panelists’ papers, are actually questions about the questioners’ own research. A sample question: “Yes, um, I was really interested in what you said about the chaotic nature of the Third Reich’s administrative regime, and I was wondering if you’d thought about doing some sort of comparison with the Spanish Empire’s administration in 16th-century Mexico, which, as I pointed out in my latest book, was similarly chaotic but without, perhaps, the added pressure of waging a global war…” Once the questioner pauses to take a breath, you’ll have an opportunity to sneak quietly out of the room. You should probably do that.

Unless you’re actually presenting a paper at the Historian Party, however, you are most likely there because you are interviewing for a job, for this is the place where the historical profession normally conducts its initial interviews before inviting finalists for on-campus interviews. These interviews are conducted either in hotel rooms reserved individually by the interviewing schools, or in a massive, partitioned ballroom known colloquially as the “bullpen.” If your interview is in a hotel room, you can expect to spend half an hour sitting on a chair in the middle of the room (or, if the room is especially small, sitting on the bed) while 3-5 faculty members seated in a semicircle pepper you with questions, many of which they will have written on yellow legal pads sitting on their knee. As unpleasant as this sounds, it is infinitely preferable to the alternative. Should you have an interview in the “bullpen,” you can expect first to sit in a sort of waiting room, or holding pen, while you wait for one of your interviewers to come out of the larger room and call your name. While sitting in the holding pen, you will notice that you’re surrounded by all those job candidates you’ve been avoiding throughout the Party, and you will further notice that this place at this time is perhaps the worst place on earth that you could possibly be. Your companions will be shaking, sweating, red-faced, pale-faced, staring into space, making awkward conversation with one another, doing breathing exercises, talking to themselves, fidgeting, flipping through printouts, and jumping up at any sound that could vaguely be their name being called out by an interviewer. Many will be doing all of these things at once. Some will be glancing at the large television on which are scrolling the names and locations of the various schools that are interviewing. Some will be weeping openly.

On being called back into the “bullpen,” you will find yourself seated in a small, curtained-off rectangle about half the size of a standard cubicle, sitting across the table from 2-4 faculty members who will spend half an hour peppering you with questions, most of which will be written on yellow legal pads. While you’re talking, your interviewers may glance around the room and wave at people they know who happen to be walking by; you may become conscious of other interviews going on a few inches away, and you may become distracted by them; you may wish you had thought to bring a bottle of water; you may wish you had gotten some sleep the night before; and you may have a very strong and sudden urge to run away screaming. If none of these things happen, you are probably in the wrong room.

Your interview over, you are now free to enjoy the highlight of the Historian Party: the book exhibit. This room can only be accessed by flashing your $170 name tag, which will momentarily make you feel like the expense was justified, although you will quickly come to your senses. Inside, you will see booths belonging to publishers, mostly academic but some trade, who will try to entice you to buy their books and, more excitingly, to “adopt” one of their books for a course you’re teaching. The people manning these booths are bloodsucking hucksters and you musn’t make eye contact with them or they will pounce on you like a hound on a fox. Instead of wandering slowly from booth to booth, you would do best to scan the room for brightly colored signs announcing “50% Conference Discounts!” or “$3 Books This Table Only!” Pay full price for nothing, but do your best to get as many cheap-to-free books as you can find, and there will be many. But I repeat: do not look the book reps in the eye. Maybe bring some pepper spray, just to be safe.

Now that you’ve attended a panel or two, survived your interview, and loaded your luggage down with cheap books, you’re ready to get down to the real business of the Historian Party: finding a bar with your historian friends and getting well and truly annihilated. As mentioned above, the Historian Party is held in a different city each year, and the nice thing about cities is that even the crappiest ones (Atlanta, say) have bars, and even if the only bar near the hotel is a slightly offensive tiki bar that serves hot buttered rum in skull-shaped plastic mugs (Atlanta again), you will find a way to have a good time. Having a good time may require murdering Elvis’s “In The Ghetto” by turning it into a duet in a karaoke bar in Washington, DC, before collapsing into a nearby hookah bar. It may require sipping $19 glasses of red wine at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City and justifying the expense by stealing the pen that the waiter brings you to sign your credit card receipt. It may even require chugging that hot buttered rum and following it up with a scorpion bowl shared amongst four other inebriated historians. But a good time will be had, and when you wake up the next day – if you wake up the next day – you will be mighty glad that you came to the Historian Party this year. And you will vow never, ever to go back.