Being a Historian

Abstract

Based on the author's more than 50 years of experience as a professional historian in academic and other capacities, Being a Historian is addressed to both aspiring and mature historians. It offers an overview of the state of the discipline of history today and the problems that confront it and its practitioners in many professions. James M. Banner, Jr argues that historians remain inadequately prepared for their rapidly changing professional world and that the discipline as a whole has yet to confront many of its deficiencies. He also argues that, no longer needing to conform automatically to the academic ideal, historians can now more safely and productively than ever before adapt to their own visions, temperaments and goals as they take up their responsibilities as scholars, teachers and public practitioners. Critical while also optimistic, this work suggests many topics for further scholarly and professional exploration, research and debate.

Teachers and the Academic Disciplines

“…In such instances, those who employ the term are alluding either to the academic profession in which the largest single group of historians continues to work or to the body of knowledge that composes the entire discipline of history. They have confused profession with discipline (Banner, , p. 2).…”

“…As he argued, ‘multiple individuals participate in the same community of thought, in the same parent discipline, as academic and public historians do. Because they dedicate their labours to the same ends, they are entitled to bear the title of historian’ (Banner, , p. 4). This argument, interestingly, is couched in Aristotelian terms that MacIntyre would recognise.…”

“…For Banner:

Historians are defined as historians not by the kind or location of their work or by the audiences they address but rather by holding themselves out as people who seek to know what happened in the past and why it did so and then to present that knowledge to others in the formats—whether articles, books, films, radio transmissions, Web sites, or museum exhibits—of their choice. Historical knowledge is the coinage of their authority (Banner, , pp. 3–4).

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Cash Limits, Hospital Prescribing and Shrinking Medical Jurisdiction

“…The recourse by the profession to its knowledge base can be seen as a bulwark against external interference, but it may also be seen as an inflexibility that makes it hard for the profession to adapt to a changing environment. As Banner (, p.4) argues ‘a profession controls the training and admittance of its successor generations in its own image’. For the medical profession this has meant a robust reliance on the principles of scientific medicine, centred on the concepts of safety and efficacy and to the exclusion of non‐traditionally linked concepts such as efficiency .…”