This has become so culturally ingrained that people will casually shame a person for studying an Arts or Humanities degree. "Have fun working at McDonalds you idiot!"
An economy is not a society.
An economy is not a society.
Do you mean by putting themselves on a pedestal without having experienced life _at_all_ and living in nothing but theories. Yeah, sure.
> These people are the ones that work with the primary sources, sifitng them and passing on the highlights.
These days, they are more the people re-writing history to fit a narrative, against any hard evidence.
If anything, the kind of people I'm talking about are the least political information workers you'll find. And honestly, there's a chance that the decimation of paying positions in their fields is contributing to the problem of badly research clickbait books. When you have to making yourself into an internet phenomena to sell your self published book rather than take a salary job at a local institution, your incentives are all aligned to do something sensational.
Edit: Just out of curiosity because I so often bump into complaints of this variety, what in your opinion is good history? Which historians or academic periods have produced "good history"? What techniques set those periods apart from today's historians?
I hope the irony that this describes a large portion of the tech industry is not lost on you.
https://www.ladbible.com/news/news-people-who-point-out-gram...
I'm not commenting on the relative value of the endeavors, just pointing out that there are opportunity costs associated with choosing a humanities degree over a STEM degree in our current environment.
Well you don’t need a CS degree to contribute to your town’s tech sector, but it sure helps.
Also, in order to write clearly you need a lot of years reading and writing practice. You can get that on your own but a humanities degree is going to get most people there faster.
Amateur historians are good to have around but you don't want to run the entire front line of primary source history gathering off them.
Why don't they put it on Wikipedia so us unwashed rubes can consume it? Seems like your local historian is slacking or...stuck in the past
A front line historian distills tens or even hundreds of thousands of pages into a lengthy dissertation or book. That document is likely too dense to be of much interest to you or I. But another historian writing popular history books might reference it and also use some of its citations to quickly find interesting primary sources.
In this way, a 500 page popular history book may be distilled from a hundred other 500 page books which themselves are distilled from thousands of pages of primary source material. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, not an archive. So it's not really the appropriate place to house anything but the most distilled of these products. Essentially, all the other material is not relevant. But it's necessary to produce the relevant stuff.
As an example, you can read the wikipedia on Lord Nelson. You'll find most of his major life events listed there. But if you buy even the lightest biography on the man you'll find much more. Why? Are the people curating Lord Nelson's page lazy for not including those details? Of course not. The Lord Nelson page is probably obnoxiously over edited. But there is probably more of a fight about what not to include than what to include. Because the article seeks to be a relevant encyclopedia entry not an exhaustive resource.
My town's coal mine history may warrant a brief mention on wikipedia but not much more than that. However, if someone were to start composing a book on say labor organizing in Western Washington state, they might be interest to consult our archive and the distilled work our historian has done. More importantly, if a historian invented an interesting mode of statistical analysis, having that raw data already partially curated could move them a long way forward. This happens pretty often. A historian comes up with a novel way to count some interesting historical phenomena and they can only do it because some enterprising local historians whiled away hours collecting specific relevant information.
Intesting discoveries about historical economies come from counting of mills and bridges and other mundane activities. The path travelled by important historical figures come from historians stitching together news items and diary entries gathered by a local obsessive historian. And so on.
But there is a real mismatch in college, in that what most people want is an education that helps them get a good job, but colleges are unfortunately not optimized for that.
If there were another institution, that was as prestigious as college, but focused much more on providing students what they actually want (IE education for the purpose of getting a job), then I think that most people would choose that instead.
Unfortunately, modern day attempts to focus on job train, such as bootcamps and trade schools, are generally less rigorous, even if they are focused more on providing students what they want.