Who is a "Historian"?

And who is not?

Longstanding and attentive listeners of my podcast, The History of the Americans Podcast, have heard me say many times, pointedly, that I am not a “historian.” I also spell that out on the “About” page on the website for the podcast. When someone in my presence or in an interview suggests that I am a historian, I go out of my way to correct them. I am a reteller and repackager of history, with only the occasional observation that is (possibly) original and might stand up to serious scrutiny. My sense is that some people who are not historians see this as a bit quirky.

I also sometimes mention that my father was a historian. At least before most of the academics took off for Bluesky, historians on X who did not approve of my approach to history sometimes took this as me claiming that I should be taken seriously because, well, my father was a historian.

In fact, the opposite is true.

I deny I am a historian because I appreciate what it is to be one. I don’t want to partake in the academic equivalent of stolen honor, or mislead anybody about my own training and methods.

The question of who is and is not a “historian” has come up in the discourse from time to time in the last year mostly because Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson had a history podcaster, Darryl Cooper, on their respective shows, in front of their massive audiences. Cooper became very well known because in those interviews and in other moments he rolled out interpretations of World War II, the rise of National Socialism in Germany, the origin of the Holocaust, and the wartime role of Winston Churchill that, suffice it to say, were wildly outside of mainstream scholarship concerned with those topics. It is not my purpose here to consider the substance of Cooper’s claims - for a thoughtful and reasonably sympathic take listen to this episode of the History Impossible podcast, which I thought was quite good.

It should be said, however, that his interviewers elevated Cooper’s professional status with a wave of the hand. Tucker Carlson told Cooper that “I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States, because I think that you are.” Cooper was not heard to object to this claim, either with regard to his importance or that he was a historian.

Whatever Cooper’s influence (and his audience is certainly large), Carlson’s praise raised eyebrows not only because he had amplified Cooper’s opinions, which are extremely controversial, but also because he had annointed Cooper as a “historian,” which he is not. It is not clear whether Carlson actually knows what a historian is but was being promotional, or whether he is as poorly informed about the meaning of the term as most people who have less cause to know.

This all came up on a subscribers-only episode of The Fifth Column Podcast on September 6, 2024, during which there was a discussion of the meaning of the word “historian” and whether it could possibly apply to Cooper. I was not entirely satisfied with that discussion, and sent the Fifth Column boys a note with my thoughts on the matter, which they dutifully republished in their regular email to subscribers. Here is a slightly cleaned up version of that email:

The reason I say I am not a historian is that, as the son of a professor of history, I have a decent sense for how academic historians think about the question. It is not a question of whether one’s writing is geared to a wider audience, although it must be said that in the last generation academic history has gotten increasingly esoteric and less likely to appeal to non-professionals. (Gordon Wood has written about this, noting that the void has been filled by non-historians, people like David McCullough and Walter Isaacson.)

I’d say that true historians do three things, in rough order of importance:

1. They work with original documents (or digital versions of them), not necessarily to the exclusion of secondary sources but definitely as the backbone of their work. Sometimes they find heretofore unknown documents; in other cases, they detect new meaning in documents that have perhaps been ignored, or misunderstood. In so doing, they unearth new historical knowledge, rather than just editorializing about or repackaging or reinterpreting the findings of others. (This is not to say that historians don’t do that in their spare time -- Heather Cox Richardson, Kevin Kruse, etc, do it all the time, but in my opinion they are not acting as historians when they do, even if they say they are.)

Therefore, one can often tell whether somebody is “a historian” by looking at their footnotes -- did they read the source documents or (even better) find new source documents, or do they merely cite the work of others who did? Has Darryl Cooper done much reading in the original German?

2. Historians are trained to “think historically,” which is to avoid anachronism. You can tell the difference more or less immediately. Historians know (or damn well should know) what fits in its time and place and what does not. They know, to pick a random example, that the Puritans didn’t banish people from Massachusetts Bay because they were @ssholes or just zealots (which some of them surely were), but because they had the same theological commitment to “conformity” within the polity that prevailed throughout the Christian world in 1635.

3. Historians are trained in historiography, meaning that they know how the historical understanding of their topic of interest has changed over time and why it has changed. This is a huge topic, over which no doubt hundreds of shelf-feet have been written over the years. Suffice it to say that the reason for changing historiography over time is not, professionally speaking, rooted in cranky overweighting of random facts to support results-oriented outcomes. (Which, by the way, is the original sin of the 1619 Project, at least according to its critics among professional historians).

All of these things are taught to scholars who earn PhDs, so it is easier to be a real historian if one has one.

Note that I do not believe one must have a PhD to become a historian; it is just unlikely that one will learn the disciplines of history - how to do those things above - if one has not been trained. And that is what a good doctoral program, and the experience of supervised original research that takes the form of a dissertation, does.

You might be wondering why I am writing about all this old news from last year now. Two reasons, actually. The first is that I have just launched this Substack, and have had questions over the years about my insistence that I am not a historian. Now seemed like as good a time as any to spell it out. The second is that I read John Fea’s book Why Study History? Reflecting on the Importance of the Past over the weekend, so it is on my mind.

But that is another matter, a topic for a future post.

Until next time.