Personally? Absolutely! When you realise the sheer, absurd depth of your field, and then realise there are untold thousands of other fields just like yours, where people could study for decades and still not know everything? You definitely feel stupid, but it's an awe-inspiring thing too. As a field, perhaps the greatest gift that studying history gives you is that of common sense. You can't ever be a specialist on every field, but you can learn to navigate a lot of the pitfalls that turn up in popular history, even in areas that you never move into in-depth.

History is a strange, fascinating, and overall massive field. No one historian can ever hope to know everything they'll need to in their field. For me, with a relatively niche topic, there are still areas I run into all the time where I simply don't have all the answers - and it's like that for most people. History is a complicated, interlocked study - and something that happens outside my area of knowledge can, and most definitely will, influence something I'm more specialised in.

There are two fantastic things about /r/Askhistorians in this regard. Firstly, there are thousands of curious, knowledgeable, passionate people here who can teach and learn from each-other. None of us will have all the answers, but specialists from different fields can work together to produce a larger picture than any one person could. Secondly, this sub encourages us to look at what we do know in fascinating ways sometimes. It's great not just for widening your knowledge, but encouraging you to re-examine what you've already learned from new angles!

Absolutely. I could give you an off the cuff presentation on the October Revolution and the subsequent transition into the Russian Civil War with ease; but ask me a question about Rome or Gaul or just about anything pre-1300's and I'm looking down at my feet and kicking rocks.

I just kinda be blunt about it if someone asks me a question IRL. I vaguely know some of it, but there's also the fact that I find that the Roman era pretty boring.

I've met quite a few people with History Master's or PhD degrees who focused on international/global history, but came to the unfortunate realization down the road that they "had studied everyone's history but their own."

Oh god do I ever. My specialization is in military equipment, battle literature, and mythology, but that puts me in a fairly small subgroup; the literature guys and linguists can run circles around me in a lot of parts of Old Norse.

That said, though, when I get the chance to inform people about stuff that's in my field, it's a hell of a rush.

I'm all for Classical Antiquity, but I barely know fuck all about anything after the 1300s AD. My knowledge just drops. I wish it wasnt like that, but after that it just stops interesting me. I feel like I SHOULD know more about it, but I just dont.

Yes. I've been getting in the Early Republican America, and it's both a huge topic, and one that is neglected in most non-specialist literature (What Hath God Wrought and presidential biography aside). Moreover, women's history and African-American history is central to understanding the time period, and has only been studied for a few decades by the 'mainstream' of historians, and even then is often dealt with as a separate field.

Speaking to my flair, everything we know about European armour and weapons is shaped by survival bias. So little is left, so we have to extrapolate from artistic depictions (which gets into art history as we have to figure out when artists were being deliberately anachronistic!), written accounts that use imprecise period terms and the very, very few surviving pieces that we have. You can do a full survey of multiple museum collections and only cover a fraction of what existed historically, and it's not even a representative sample (non-Italian, non-German armour from the 15th century doesn't survive much).

I do feel it, but I do not feel burdened by it. It is asking too much for any individual to understand all of any field, and historians are no different. Human knowledge doesn't work that way. It isn't, in the end, about what one person knows. It's about the collected knowledge and work of everyone working on these topics. In that sense, historical knowledge isn't a "thing" but rather a process. Rather than being burdened by this fact, I think it is - to put it frankly - really cool to be a part of that process, even if just a tiny part.

The more you know, the more you realize how little you know. There really is no shame in that, it's actually what keeps me interested. I don't feel burdened by it though. Studying history is more about studying patterns and analyzing problems than it is about remembering every single event. Part of my skillset is the fact that I can easily find relevant academic articles, evaluate them, understand them and then place them within the bigger picture. Even if you would manage to be fairly well-versed in nearly all historical fields, after a few hundred years of studying and several aneurysms, you'd still know little about kindred disciplines like anthropologhy, sociology or economics. All which are just as essential to understanding history.