Meanwhile, of course, something we expect from historians working as history educators is to avoid egregious error. Everyone makes mistakes and our understanding of the past changes, but if a historian confabulated data out of nothing, we'd fire them. Ask Michael Bellesiles. Or Naomi Wolf. 6/
So what you have here are folks who do not understand what historians do assuming that 'doing history' is summarizing textbooks rather than realizing that doing history is making the critical and analytical decisions that shape textbooks. Embarrassing ignorance, but also very bad for the field./end
I think a lot of people think there's nothing more to being a historian than knowing lots of dates and facts and names, which is like thinking being a mathematician involves being really good at arithmetic.
Even I, as a person who studied history extensively and is bad at math, knows that math is more than just "being able to solve math problems." Someone has to come up with new problems to solve! #smdh
If you want to know more about what historians actually do, I've covered that in two posts, one on what the job of a research historian actually is (acoup.blog/2025/03/07/c...) and another on how that research moves through other kinds of historians to reach the public (acoup.blog/2020/07/09/c...)
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The other bad news -- "embalmer" rated high on their list of jobs that aren't endangered 😱
The links on your blog are a very useful and salient reminder of the work historians do. Thank you for taking the time to share it so eloquently.