Theoretically you do not need any sort of qualifications, degree, or affiliation to publish in any academic journal, let alone Smithsonian Magazine or whatever, where articles are written by professional journalists usually, not "historians" proper. Theoretically it's possible, anyway. It's hard, and good work doesn't always stand on its own, academics are prone to classism and snobbery like anyone else. If you open up any academic paper it will have the author (or authors) listed with affiliation, which is usually something like "Associate Professor, University of Extremely Northern Idaho" but sometimes you'll see a little magic phrase after someone's name... "Independent Scholar." Here's some examples in Google Scholar, for papers that hit the keyword "history." That phrase means they don't have an academic job, and they can be just about anyone with any credentials. Usually it's someone with some big ole degrees, but who just can't get into academia from bad luck or life pressures (or doesn't want to), but very rarely, you get a shooting star of someone who got published without their "proper" terminal degree.

Have you heard the term "peer reviewed" in academic papers before? Many academic journals are peer reviewed, so several academics in the field of study will read a paper and decide whether or not to publish it. In academic publishing, there's something called "blind reviewing." The first type is single blind, where the person reading your paper knows who you are, but you don't know who this jerk poking holes in your work is. Pretty unfair! The second kind is double blind, where the reviewer has no idea who you are, and you have no idea who they are, and the work (theoretically) stands on its own research and citations. However, the purity of the turf is not so pure. If it's optional in a journal, it tends to punish those who chose to go double blind. However lots of journals make it mandatory, and most academics see it as a marker of the journal's quality and commitment to scholarship.

I have the good luck to meet more independent scholars than most people, because I'm an archivist, and the archives is in some ways a great equalizer, to see who can do genuinely good work, vs. who can fruitlessly bumble around in boxes on some poor university's dime for 5 days. And any IS that funds their own way to the archives always does really good work, and fast! Give me an independent scholar over a dumb PhD holder who's going to photograph every. damn. thing. in the box any day. But they don't usually publish academic papers... the odd thing is, it's often a complete waste of an independent scholar's time to write anything other than a book. Books can make money, academic papers absolutely don't. The open access model in particular is very damaging to independent scholarship, because it makes an actual monetary demand on you, instead of merely giving your work away. So there's very little reason for anyone not sweating trying to get tenure to go to the hassle and long time frame (it can take a year or more to publish a single paper, after it's been written) to publish an academic paper.

So there you go. You can publish in the most prestigious academic journal you want with this degree... theoretically.