I believe the point of AskHistorians is to get rid of the "versus."

I'll keep this short and sweet.

I'm an academic historian, and I don't view AskHistorians as either academic history or buff history. I would classify it as public history, an altogether different category. I'd venture that most folks here are not academic historians, although some surely are, and like most academics, I tend to share the biases of that group against non-academics, but like your professor, I would never go so far as to say that one is better than the other. The value of each type of history depends on the audience for that history.

AskHistorians is geared towards a general, public audience. Academic history is geared towards academics and buff history is geared towards history buffs. Each has its merits and faults, all of which are more or less important depending on the audience in question. Academic historians are often not great writers (there is a reason history is often considered to by "dry"). Buff historians tend to ask questions only a very small group cares about. And public historians tend to simplify history for consumption by the masses (as compared to academic history anyway). The faults of one type of history tend to be negated by the strengths of another.

Or at least, that's my 2 cents

What your professor is alluring to is what some of us call a "river counter" as a "history buff." River counters are those whom study numbers and quantifiable knowledge but spend little time studying practical application. On paper a Panther tank is better than a Sherman but in reality the Sherman is superior in terms of logistics and usability.

Another example I fight is "why didn't they use longbows during the Napoleonic era?" In theory, it makes sense, the long now has an equal or superior range, doesn't kick up the unnecessary smoke, and is more accurate. However it ignores the practical training application of a musket since a bow takes many years to even be capable.

However this doesn't mean you need to be in grad school to do academic history, you just need to work harder for collecting Primary sources.

Breaking news: Academic historians praise the superiority virtues of Academic History. ;-)

More seriously though, that academics criticize non-academics is a universal and timeless fact. Some of the critiques are very fair, you can look at any number of "quack history" examples that are often asked about here.

However, to say that use of secondary sources is weak is analogous to saying that anything other than the purest sciences are useless. We can easily find poor quality research based on primary sources and in fact this is too easy to do by simply over-fitting hypothesis on any piece of primary evidence, even before we get into the issue that primary sources can easily lie or be biased or be wrong in the first place. How would we then know their reliability and value? You got it --- through analysis.

All that said, I believe that there is a huge value in publishing in peer-reviewed journals. This is not to say that all peer-reviewed publications are good; even in the sciences this is not true because the quality of reviews has high variance. I would go farther and say that the willingness to subject one's work to review is a key characteristic that is sorely needed, something that many quack historians like to avoid.

Importantly, first you have to distinguish between what it takes to have a good understanding of a topic in history, and what it takes to do good research in that topic. These are two very different questions and I don't think r/AskHistorians engages in original research. It would not be defensible when sources are asked for. Many flairs are or were actually academic historians and they know how to do quality original research. The rest, as far as I am concerned, do not even pretend that they are doing original research.

/r/AskHistorians is a mix of academic and non-academic historians. I myself am not an academic historian even though I have plenty of academic training in science. However I strongly reject the classification of either academic historian OR buff historian.

So I think everyone else has done a better job than I could do on the versus aspect, but I'm going to push back against the idea that "buffs" do very little original research. I'm an archivist, and I have the chance to see lots of hobby historians or casual untrained historians do lots of original archival research, but it's just things you're not likely to hear or read about. These researchers typically write local histories, family histories, biographies, or what we call "institutional histories" which are like the biography of an organization or a company or a university. The quality of these histories is often mixed, but there's a lot of good ones, and there's a lot of garbage academic stuff published too, Lord knows.

I imagine the work of these historians is just totally invisible to your professor, simply because their labor doesn't matter to him, or to most people in academia. But there's buffs out there in the archives, I promise you they visit a lot! And they're usually very nice!

edit: fascinating question though, I'm sorry you felt you needed to use a throwaway! :(

Interesting question and one which I've thought about a lot over the years.

I'm an academic historian, inasmuch as I have a PhD in history, conduct original primary source research, and have published peer-reviewed. I'm also a public historian, inasmuch as I have published works of popular history, done TV documentaries, and am a prolific contributor to internet history forums in my subjects. I'm also a history buff, inasmuch as I am crazily obsessed with pointless minutiae in various fields.

I don't think that there should be a vs. issue, but I'm well aware there is. Too often I have heard academic historians dismissing public historians (or 'popular' historians, as they're frequently known up in the ivory towers) without even really thinking about it.

The thing with public historians is that they do very different work from academic historians on the whole (yes, there are exceptions, of course). Academic historians ask questions, and seek the answers to those questions. To be truly academic those questions need to have answers which are not only intrinsic to the question, but which might have a wider application.

For example, the question, 'What diameter rivets were used on the Panzer Mk III armour plating?' is not an academic question, because the answer to it tells us only about the armour of a Panzer III. But the question 'Why did the designers of the Panzer Mk III opt for 5/16"^1 rivets?' might tell us something about 1940s engineering, German wartime industry, and other things besides.

Perhaps the most significant difference is over the question of research and dissemination. On the whole, academics do research, they find out new things, come up with new interpretations, use new sources, ask new questions. It's new. Public historians in general take the work of academic historians, distil it into a digestible form and disseminate it to a much wider audience. This, of course, is hugely important, but it's not new. More than anything else, I think that's why academics look down on public historians.

The disdain (if that's what it is) can cut both ways. I've been in conversations with respected popular historians who have been very critical of the dull, stuffy, and boring academics whose work they feel obliged to read. What both sides forget when they are being rivals is that they are both a part of a much larger process that, ultimately, sees the information in the archive reach the man-on-the-street. It's a production process: the academic historian harvests the history, the public historian makes it taste good and packages it attractively, and the consumer gobbles it up while the buff historian is reading the list of ingredients.

That's a long-winded way of me agreeing with others that AH falls (mostly) into the 'public' history bracket.

^1 I have no idea what size rivets were used on the armour plating of a Panzer III

I don't entirely agree with your professor's categories. By his metric, people interested in minutiae (like re-enactors, or local history societies) don't do primary source research or publish in academic journals, but that's not always true. Local historical societies, local history journals, and serious reenactors all do real history on a local level. And while it's true that they usually (though not always) lack a theoretical background, and typically (but not in every case) don't fully grasp the big-picture of academic conversation surrounding their area of interest - the historiography - as well as a professional academic, they do typically know their local archives and museum collections better than anyone, and are some of the best people to know when you find yourself researching in their backyard because they know what all the pieces (the primary, not secondary sources) are and where to find them, even if they can't fit them into a wider disciplinary conversation as well as a professional historian can.

So I don't like suggesting that non-academic buffs don't know or do real primary source history. It would be better, I think, to emphasize the second half of what your professor said: that academic historians have more refined methods for reading primary sources in our wider context, are able to read outside our immediate local interest with a more critical eye (because of these methods), and - because it's part of our jobs - spend more time in conversation with other professional historians than the amateur members of a local historical society are generally able to do.

Where does AskHistorians fit? I think /u/Jan_van_Bergen nailed it by saying this is a place for public history. Academics and other history lovers mingle to make professional history as accessible as possible to as many people as possible by sharing narratives, perspectives, and sources, and answering questions in a way that affirms (rather than denies, a la history channel) the value of evidence and academic research.

For myself as an academic, posting here pushes the same buttons as teaching my students. It's an opportunity to try to make things I care about available to everyone, and to try to be more transparent about the ways in which historians approach questions, martial evidence, and formulate narratives about the past.

Everyone has a stake in history, but history - like other sciences - isn't something everyone is able to dedicate the time and training to do. It takes years of training in specialized methods, and years and years of careful reading to start to get good at evaluating the fragments of dead people's lives we use to understand the past, and as a result a lot of history writing is really arcaine. It has to be - there's no way to publish an archaeology report, or a critical edition of a primary source, that's readable to a non-specialist. But everyone has a stake in history, and - especially since so many of us are oublicly funded - a right to the research historians do.

AskHistorians is a place where people - academics and non-professionals alike - translate and discuss this specialized knowledge so everyone can benefit from it.

When I was in University I was told there was a difference between a History Buff and a Historian. The difference was, a History Buff could tell you when a Battle happened, who won, the causalities, and what happened next.

A Historian would tell you why it was important.

I think this is where the distinction lies. The trends, looking deeper into an event rather than stocking up on facts and anecdotes. Doing research comes into this. If dates and who won was all that was important, history would not need research. We (as Historians) want to know the patterns, the implications, the depth of why something happened, its long term effects, its place in history as a whole.

The problem is with AskHistorians we get questions from the public. The Public by and large was taught in High School and high school history normally is more dates and numbers, Rivet Counting as /u/DonaldFDraper has said. This leads to questions along those lines. These questions, and the publics knowledge is not a bad thing. I am not disparaging the questions asked here. However, this means that the answers we give HAVE to be catered to this audience. We do have purely academic questions and answers, that would be well fitted in a Graduate Level Seminar at an prestigious University. But these happen far less, because of the average person asking the question. Again, I am not trying to say that this is bad. AskHistorians is unique because a lot of us are Historians. Often the ivory tower is far away from someone wanting answers.

So to answer. I don't think AskHistorians is either. We're a group of historians, history buffs, and rivet counters who help answer questions from the "public." Whereas Academics often only answer questions between themselves. AskHistorians could be Academic and has been, but it depends on the questions asked.

Because ultimately the content we (as flairs or answered) provide is decided by the community.

Disclaimer: the following is not meant to disparage /r/askhistorians in any way.

Although there's good discussion going on here in terms of "buff" vs. "academic" history, but I see a pervasive misunderstanding floating around here regarding /r/askhistorians itself. The community here may be comprised of historians of all stripes, and may deal with historical topics, but /r/askhistorians does not "do" history. Absolutely no history being done here, at least not that I've seen.

No research takes place here, regardless of methods or sources used. The closest I ever see it come is when someone here asks for leads on sources, books, etc for a topic they're researching. But then those people go off and "do" history someplace else. No new historical interpretations, or arguments, or insights are born here. Instead existing insights are relayed here. What /r/askhistorians does is discuss and, most often, teach history. The standard procedure here involves people who know about a topic disseminating information for the benefit of people who don't know. It's slightly less conventional and certainly less rigorous than conventional avenues of teaching history, but that's what's accomplished here.

This subreddit is a wonderful place of education, engagement, and community among professionals and enthusiasts of all education and experience levels. But there is absolutely no cutting edge, new history appearing here because it all originated somewhere else, usually in the books we cite or when we discuss our own (independently constructed) research projects. This is not a press, or a journal, or a university, or a research institute. This does not even approach a conference, where historians gather specifically to focus on new developments in the discipline (periodic threads on new developments are the exception that prove the rule). It is, first and foremost, an education portal.

As others have said, I see AskHistorians as a place for different approaches to history to work together to promote interest in this subject. I am currently training to become an academic historian, but that doesn't mean that I get to neglect engaging with the public. In my experience, some academics are very keen on doing just that, either through social media like Twitter or by writing blogs. Others are more traditional, but different approaches are all still valid and I don't think we can judge one or the other as 'better'. The answers here, although not original research, are still informative and often provide a far more historical picture than what 'popular' history books have provided, so to me it seems to be an incredibly useful forum for people to get a sense of what academic research is actually like and what it has produced, something that is conventionally seen as quite boring and locked away in an ivory tower. Instead, I think academic research is quite exciting, full of interesting theories and insane stories from the past, a far cry from the view that historians just memorise dates or regurgitate timelines.

In fact, I think my time here has been quite useful for myself as well. Looking back at my answers, I struggle to find comments that could not be tied in some way to my own research, so even though Reddit is a very different medium to academic papers, I am still using it to develop my own ideas. Yes some of the questions are a bit strange, but others have made me think again about a particular topic or encouraged me to approach it from a different angle. A question on contact between the late Roman empire and Tang China has for instance led me to dig up a bunch of Chinese sources and to form my own interpretation of the evidence, which I hope can be turned into a half-decent paper in the future - without someone on Reddit being intrigued by this topic, I doubt I would have ever ventured so far away from my comfort zone!

Moreover, despite the discipline's dull reputation, the mark of a truly great historian is the ability to write well and make their work accessible to non-specialists; although I still write overly long answers here, I do think that my writing skill has improved over time and that I am getting better at this whole public engagement thing. This is I think essential for being a historian in the twenty-first century, so the presence of so many different types of historians, whether academics or amateurs, in this subreddit is beneficial for everyone involved. After all, where else can we find such a diverse bunch of people, all of whom are interested in history, but also with all kinds of backgrounds and interests? I certainly won't have the conversations I have had here with people in my faculty or with people I meet at conferences!

Obviously academic questions are not being posted here. It's a different game. I suspect that most of the devotees of this forum are not academics, would look at a question like "what would gender construction and signification be, for 17th century salt-makers in Vaucluse" and think, who cares? They would, more importantly, be unable to publish or grant tenure to the person answering.

The fact that this forum is open to most questions, but that knowledgeable people who spend time here are free to ignore ones they don't want to answer, means some very useful general information gets posted, however, and some good references get cited. The process produces better results than you get with The History Channel, that's for damn sure.

There are precious few professions or specialties where the professionals do not look down on the amateurs. I maintain that it's nothing more than a matter of time logged. Dig trenches all day long and you'll find ways to critique a weekend ditcher. The critique will be completely valid - you know dirt well - but 80% of the time, someone's just looking for a moat to hold off the catpeople of Zera 6 and that distinction isn't going to be wholly relevant. And nothing breeds contempt like familiarity. It's like listening to a song you know well played slightly off key. (The only fields or topics you don't see this in is ones that are just that small where you can't operate with a tension between the two sides.)

As a failed historian, I don't think that the academic/buff distinction is particularly relevant in /r/askhistorians, because above anything else, this is crowdsourced. Official Ask Historian Medieval Mediterranean Conflict is not waiting for the AH sign to appear when someone asks a question about the Siege of Tangiers. It's more like the hivemind is out there, answering questions. It doesn't really care about your credentials, because it's not really about debate, academic or informal. It's about general understanding about general questions, whichworks because the questions tend to fall into general topics. Even the ones that are specific aren't truly specific in that what I would suggest historians tend to treat specificity. A lot of the time that sort of hivemind idea represents a sort of commonsense position of academic historians, so there's definitely more of a fixture to that side, but it's not necessarily that way.

I summarize it like this: There is a mountain of difference between the academic historian and the history buff, both in the intention, relevance, and meaning of their pursuits. The main difference is the treatment of history as a set of facts, versus viewing it as a discourse.

The history buff tends to research for their own personal enrichment--just because they find it interesting--and dig deep into a certain subject, usually not an entire "field", to understand minute details about that thing they find interesting. Let's say, the weapons, food, uniforms, etc., of a single American Civil War regiment; or the history of the Pilgrims only as they pertain to their particular family branch. They'll know where each member of a ship of immigrants settled, know who they married, etc., but they'll have a generally narrower understanding of why the immigrants came in the first place. They might know about he houses they lived in, the tools they used to work, cook, and play, but they generally don't have much of an understanding of the world that historical cultures lived in. When they tell the story, they generally don't tell it in terms of "so-and-so argued that immigration was caused by this, but whats-his-face contradicts that by saying blah blah blah. I, personally, have found evidence that it's because of ....."

The key here is that academic history is a discourse, and historians understand that history only exists to the extent that historians can show it to exist through the written medium. We do this by taking evidence and "facts", and then interpreting them within a wider field of research to pull meaning out of them. History buffs know the facts, and may even uncover some of them; historians make arguments based on facts.

In the end, one does not have to be "better" than the other; history is meaningful to all of humanity. Except a historian usually hopes to get paid for what she/he does. Historians can even sometimes benefit from the research of "history buffs": in my historiography class we discussed a book written by an older woman from our region (the plains) who, in retirement, wrote a long book detailing the process by which candles were made in the region in the 19th century. A historian generally wouldn't pick up that book to read just to know how candles were made unless they were making a specific argument about what candlemaking meant to that society.

My field, medieval history, is particularly sensitive to the distinction between "history buffs" and historians, and the discussion can be emotionally charged. There are many people who are "into the Middle Ages", and can tell you all about castles, knightly armor, swords, and the martial arts; however, they generally have a poor understanding of what medieval people were actually like, their culture, their business, their religion, their hopes, their fears, etc. I feel like most academic medieval historians work on those things to a great extent.

For a good example of what I'm talking about, pick up a copy of Paul Freedman's Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. A book on this topic could smack of the antiquarianism of a history buff, but Freedman penetrates the "facts" about the spices people used and how they obtained them to give us the great meaning of spices in medieval society.

Ok, so for all this, where does r/askhistorians fit in? Original historical research is not being conducted through Reddit (unless you're writing on the history of reddit). Askhistorians is a forum for presenting research; it is a secondary resource meant to spur, in my mind, people on to doing their own further research. Its strength lies in its accessibility: have a question about a topic? Get information from someone who knows. I assume the general askhistorians consumer (as well as many contributors) is either a "history buff" who has a personal interest in a given topic, or is a student required to be learning about something. Although I'm sure it happens, I'm assuming that very few of the questions here are posed by established or aspiring scholars looking to further their own research. We generally don't see competing discourses and interpretations being hashed out by reinterpretation or the introduction of new evidence.

In the end, as an academic historian I'm absolutely biased; I view my foray into academic history as something of a "graduation" from being a "history buff" in my youth. But I'm totally interested in hearing what others have to say in response to this.

A complication of your professors distinction between "buff history" and "academic history" can be found in local amateur genealogical societies. Especially on the small scale local level, amateur geneologists can have spent years tracking down church records and gravestone, which form an invaluable set of primary sources for modern historians trying to understand early modern demography.