So are historians a self employed job who go and discover new things about history and write books about it or do they sign up with like a company and they fly them out to an area to discover and learn about undiscovered history. Sorry if I sound dumb asking this but I really want to know because I have been having it on my mind to be one but I am not really sure how it works.
Well, it depends on the historian.
There are some who conduct research on their own time and dollar. But research is time consuming, and accessing archival material may require constant trips or paying for someone else to research or copy documents you may need.
Others are employed to conduct research and produce something from it. They may be employed by a university, a government agency, a museum, historical society, or even a corporation.
Free-lance historians span the gamut of education, from self-taught to PhDs. Professional historians most often hold a graduate degree, MA or PhD.
Research has to have a justifiable reason if your employer is footing the bill - meaning you must have a research question and identified the sources you need. Funding is never a blank check to see what you can find, but one step in the long process of historical inquiry.
If you wish to have a self-employed job as historian then you would likely be writing books based on your own, unique argument. (Historians are constantly trying to push and prove their argument about a certain topic to other historians, we spend our lives doing it). However, if you wish to write your own material then you would need a large amount of reference and source material to go along with it; and by that I mean you would generally need more than just sources taken from an archive.
For example, if you were writing a book in regards to a topic such as the founding of the Atlantic world, you would be a much more credible and respected source (not to mention much more well informed) if you actually traveled to the relevant areas (in this case countries such as Mexico) and conducted deep research there. Obviously this is a financial difficulty for most (unless you have the luxury of a financial grant if you are doing the study while partnered with a university) so quite a historian would gain employment as a museum curator, heritage manager, archivist etc. There is also the option of being a history teacher at a secondary school, which would require you to get at least 2:1 or sometimes a 2:2 in your undergraduate degree. If you decide to become a history lecturer at a university, then you would need to not only study for a three-year BA, but also a Masters degree and finally a PhD.
Just remember, being a historian is more than just reading a few books and writing about it. You have to be able to analyse the points that the author is getting across, and understand what their argument(s) are so that you can formulate an opinion of it.