Why Join a Professional Historical Association?

Being a historian can be expensive. In addition to all the costs we shoulder (research trips, journals, books, reproduction fees, computers, software, etc.), we must decide whether to spend money on memberships to professional historical associations. If you can swing it, I believe you should join at least two professional historical associations: the American Historical Association (AHA) and the primary organization for your specific historical field.  

Why join the AHA? 

The American Historical Association is the organization for our guild, even if you work outside of academia. The organization advocates for government funding for archives and historical research, and it keeps tabs on legislation that has the potential to either benefit or hinder our work. Basically, they focus on and monitor potentially important issues so we can concentrate on our historical pursuits.

The AHA also facilitates the largest discussion forum for issues relating to the profession. Non-Academic historians should particularly care about this work as one of the organization's main conversations is about how to dissolve the gap between academic and non-academic historians.

Aside from this advocacy work, I find that the AHA has 3 practical benefits that makes membership worth the cost:

1. Subscription to Perspectives on History: AHA's publication about the guild, Perspectives provides short, concise articles about technology and software that can improve our productivity, how other historians work and teach, happenings we should be aware of, and updates on the organization's advocacy work.

2. Fellowship and Prize Board: Historians need fellowships and the AHA makes it easy to search for them on their website and, as the association for the guild, most prize-granting organizations advertise through them.

3. Reduced Admission to the Annual Conference: The annual conference focuses on the profession not a specialty. The conference features many networking opportunities, panels where historians from different fields make connections across time and place, and a plethora of panels that discuss methods to improve the way we work or techniques we can use to market ourselves to potential employers. Read Kenneth Pomeranz's Perspectives article for more on why the AHA offers a great conference.

Why Join an Organization for Your Specialty?

Specialty-focused organizations provide journals and annual conferences that keep their members abreast of the work and conversations going on among historians of the same sub-field. Membership in these organizations is particularly important for non-academic historians as we work apart from the scholars who drive the historiography. As it becomes more difficult for historians to formally publish their work, especially for those of us who lack institutional affiliation, we must keep abreast of the conversations in our field so we can keep our work relevant and know how to pitch ourselves to editors.

Leaving the Academy: How To Become an Independent Historian

Do I want to be an academic historian? I began having doubts about my career path during my last three years in graduate school. I had applied to grad school to become professionally-trained version of David McCullough. However, in my first quarter I replaced that goal with a desire for an academic career. No one forced this ambition on me per se, but my seminars, department workshops, and training were all geared towards preparing me for a tenure-track job. After imbibing on this academic dream for seven years, I found it difficult to confront the fact that I did not want to be a traditional academic. At first, I pushed my doubts from my mind by focusing on my dissertation. As my dissertation neared completion, I turned my attention to academic job applications. I told myself that getting a job would vanquish my fears about an academic career. Last year, I opened rejection letters and e-mails from nearly every university I had applied to. Even the two campus interviews I went on did not pan out. Through it all I remained surprisingly upbeat. Rejection, my positive attitude, and a job opportunity for my partner in Boston made me address the fact that I was pursuing an academic job for all the wrong reasons.

It took me over a year to admit that I really wanted a non-academic career. With all of its promises for intellectual stimulation, I found my decision to leave the academy a hard pill to swallow. Moreover, I want to be a historian. I yearn to produce original, high-quality scholarship that will be accessible to a broad audience. I also desire the opportunity to earn the respect of my academic peers. Although all are lofty goals, the latter will be the most difficult to achieve; many academic historians shun outsiders and view non-tenured or non-tenure-track historians as amateurs little deserving of their time. Still, I am up for the challenge.

Presently, I am working as an independent historian. I am revising my dissertation into a book, writing articles for academic journals and popular history magazines, and working to improve my writing and editing skills. I plan to use this blog as a forum: a place to share my successes and failures in figuring out ways to get paid for my work, methods for getting around the various barriers that come with being unaffiliated with an academic institution, my passion for history, and any tools and/or techniques that improve or hamper my ability to research and write.

Getting Access: Newspapers from Early America

Welcome to Getting Access, a series devoted to helping you obtain the digital records you need. Companies like Newsbank/Readex are on a mission to digitize early American records. Their Early American Newspapers and Early American Imprints databases offer a comprehensive collection of digitized early American tracts and newspapers.

It used to be that to access these databases you had be affiliated with (or live near) one of the wealthy research institutions that can afford to pay their enormous subscription fees. However, Newsbank offers an affordable backdoor to a lot of the content stored in its expensive Readex-branded databases.

GenealogyBank

In October 2006, Newsbank launched GenealogyBank, a direct-to-consumer resource that "provide[s] researchers with unprecedented Web-based access to millions of the United States' core genealogical records from the 17th to the 21st centuries."

Geared for genealogical queries and non-professional researchers, GenealogyBank does not offer the advanced search options of its Readex counterparts, Early American Newspapers or America's Historical Newspapers.

The search interface gives preference to names of people rather than dates. Users cannot access the issue lists for a given newspaper title. To pull up a page view of an entire issue, users must first click on an article and then click on the "Page [1]" link located on the left-hand side above the article title. Users cannot navigate from full-page view to full-page view.

Still, with a little persistence users should be able to find the information they need from the comfort of their homes.

 The Bottom Line

GenealogyBank may be a tad cumbersome to use, but at $69.95/year it offers underprivileged historians affordable access to newspapers and imprints that they could only access in physical archives or by visiting a library that has a subscription to the Readex-branded databases.

What Do You Think?

Have you found any helpful ways for accessing early American newspapers online? If so please leave a comment or send me a tweet.