Career paths for historians can be divided into two directions: academic historians and public historians. The term "academic historian" usually refers to those teaching in higher education, since that profession often includes publishing as a professional scholar. Publishing is not always part of the picture because community or junior colleges typically stress teaching over publishing, and few of the instructors keep their hands in that part of academia. This side of history properly also includes those teaching in secondary education, although scholars would not necessarily include a high school teacher as being an academic historian. Nevertheless, this "teaching path" for the historian ranges from public (and private) schools all the way through the university.

Public historians include - to answer the question of /u/symes - private sector employment. Roughly half of those employed as historians have jobs outside the teaching side of history. These include those employed by museums, archives, historic preservation, and various other places. Many large corporations have corporate historians who work with records and/or a corporate museum. These places range from Wells Fargo Bank to the Disney Corporation and the Tabasco Pepper Sauce Company. Many archaeological consulting companies employ a historian to assess the significance of buildings and/or to conduct research on historical archaeological sites (and help write reports). Some public historians continue to teach and publish (I was a public historian for thirty years, throughout which I published and taught at the university).

There is a great deal of diversity in the public sector, and some of it is left to the imagination of the historian. I know of one extremely talented historian who was unable to secure a tenure-track position at a university (an increasingly-common problem); she has set off to build a business as a private consulting historian. She has entered the "gig economy" by contracting out for museum exhibits for local governments, building web pages on history for various customers, etc. While I can't imagine such a career, my experience is part of the past, and this historian is clearly peering into the future.

All of this said, I encourage you to pursue your interests - but I also caution you to be aware that your interests may very well change. I knew I wanted to study the past since I was much younger than you, but a well-meaning teacher derailed me, and I wandered through various other topics. It was actually a great process because it expanded my horizons. I eventually returned to my original inspiration, but the most important thing was that when I finally settled on a career and my fields of research, I brought a range of experience and study to the table, making me - I hope - that much better of a historian - and folklorist - but that is another digression.

At your age, I recommend that you go to your local museum, historical park, or local library with an archive and find out if there is an opportunity to volunteer. It would be useful for you to see the inner workings of these sorts of institutions. The experience you gain can be extremely useful, and this is a great way for you to acquire first-hand experience and perspective into the range of possible professions that are available.

Best of luck on your journey. I hope it is a remarkable one.

I am still in college, but I hope I can help you. Also, I'm brazilian, so there might be differences.

1. Will you be a teacher?

Every historian has to answer this. The majority of us go to work in schools, but a part goes to colleges and research institutes. Obviously, lecturing in a college involves time and several degrees, so basically everybody that isn't a hig-profile prodigy works at a (or several. Brazilian teachers aren't very well-paid) for some time.

This said, you can technically be employed by private companies, because private schools sure are those. Also, private consultants exist. Any videogame, film, soap opera or even samba parade (you know those if you have even heard the name "Brazil" before) that has historical themes is expected to get them at least a little bit right, so they hire historians. But beware, because consulting is generally a top-notch profession among historians, so you have to be some kind of specialist or renowned name in your field.

2. What do you research?

Obviously, if you want to be a history teacher, you can ask any of your teachers how it's like. Bit if you want to research, it's another talk altogether. Firstly, basically all historians are employed by governmental institutions. It seems that this kind of research doesn't have any kind of profit attached to (it usually doesn't) so just the government backs it up.

Once you start researching, you must do two things: go to the library and read. Not just the library, but the archives. This is where you get your primary fonts, the papers of long gone people. It's my internship right now. It's kinda boring, to be sincere. Lots of seating and searching for some kind of specific document, but you find lots of interesting things at random.

If you work doesn't require a trip down archive-road, research is basically done at home. And let me stress, historians read A LOT. If you don't like reading, get used to it. If you like, you are in for a light breeze. You must read teoretical books, not just fiction, so it's a little more tiring. Also, the reading is so important that you will probably stop reading fiction if you do now. Your college and job will be reading, you probably won't be eager to do it in your free time.

If you like reading, then get ready to write. A researcher must write a lot of essays and papers (in Brazil, you also have to lecture at college) so being able and liking to write are life-changing qualities.

Basically, the profession is a weird mix of teaching and reading/writing with some consulting or museum direction for tge already renowned. You can also write books for the general public, but it's another talk with the editorial people. If you like to read, write and talk about interesting things, I hope you become one of us.

And don't forget to select a research subject that interests you and is accomplishable. In History, basically everything can be researched. I, for example, will write about videogames in my thesis.

Wish you luck

So this will vary quite a lot depending on where the job is (see my other comment for more details on that), but I will give an answer for the "academic historian" side of things. It is just worth prefacing this with the comment that to get a job as a historian on a tenure-track position at a university, it typically requires a PhD in the subject these days (not just a BA or MA). It is also a necessarily disclaimer that actually getting such a job is a tough thing from a purely numerical perspective — there are far more people with PhDs in history than there are academic jobs to employ them. (Behold the Graph of Doom, which charts the difference between number of PhDs granted per year and the number of job openings advertised per year, in the United States.)

Huge disclaimer: these things vary by country (I am writing from the perspective of the USA), vary by sub-field of history (I am a historian of science, which is a relatively small sub-field compared to, say, American History, and there are many other specialties of history), and will vary by institution (different universities have different expectations, resources, and so on).

As someone on the tenure-track (which is to say, I do not have tenure yet, but I have the option to apply for it after a few years — tenure, just to clarify, means that I essentially have job security and will become very hard to fire, even if I irritate people even more greatly than I actually do), the basic things my institution wants out of me fall into the categories of Research, Teaching, and Service.

Research is what most people think of as the job of the historian. Depending on your institution, it might be all they really care about, or it might be a small component, or some place in between. It is the part of the job where you read books, go to archives, go to conferences, write papers, write books, give talks.

The exact form of the research will vary by historian and subject. Much of mine can be done digitally or with travel within the USA. For others, research may involve spending years abroad, going through archives in other countries. For many it involves learning and using new languages.

Research also involves the job of disseminating the research. So we attend conferences (I attend at least one per year, but generally around three or four), which serve both as places to tell people what you're doing and learn what they are doing, but also to keep tabs with your friends and colleagues who live in other parts of the country, and to network with other scholars (in other words, it has a social function that is also very important and not at all incidental — it is why we do these things in person and not just through publications). The work also involves publication, in the form of articles and books. People vary in how long this takes them, but for me, anyway, it is not uncommon for an article in print to be the result of several years of research. (I work on many research projects subjects concurrently, so I try to have a stead stream of output despite the slowness.) As for books... well, I shouldn't talk about that, because I'm still trying to finish my first book! But I am about 5 years overdue on my contract, if that gives you any hint about my own speed there. For tenure, my institution will expect me to have about the equivalent of one major article per year I have worked here, and a well-reviewed book. That is fairly modest by institutional standards (my institution, unlike many other institutions, has other requirements that may not be as modest by other standards — e.g., they prioritize bringing in external research funding higher than some places do, and they also value public outreach, like publishing to a broader audience, more than most institutions do). In Ivy League universities, they sometimes have a two-book requirement, which is nontrivially difficult (it is hard to write one good book in 6-7 years, it is near impossible to write two good books in that time).

One might imagine that what I've described above is "the job" but it really is not. The most common complaint from those on the tenure track is that they do far less of the Research phase than they wish they could, or feel they should, since that is often what they are most severely judged on by their colleagues.

The Teaching phase of the job is about what you would expect it to be. I teach classes, both lecturing and leading discussions, and assign homework/reading and exams, meet with students, and do grading. Again, this varies by institution. I have taught places where the grading was done by graduate students, so all of my interactions were limited to lecturing and making exams. At my current institutions, I do all my own grading (which I admit I loathe, but there is part of every job that feels that way). The amount of teaching required varies heavily by institution. My own institution's arrangement is a bit unusual so I will not elaborate on it much, but I typically teach in class between 6 and 9 hours per week, depending on the semester (most places rotate teaching responsibilities a bit), and who knows how much time is spent grading, preparing, and the other functions of teaching (a lot). The time requirements vary by the class subject; this semester I am teaching a "heavy load" (9 hours) but the amount of preparation is far less than it was last semester when I taught a "light load" (6 hours), because the nature of the courses this semester is that they don't require as much preparation (I am not doing any lecturing, for example, so those are many hours preparing lectures I have saved; on the other hand, for lecture courses I have taught many times before, the work of preparation can be very light indeed).

Attitudes towards teaching vary by individual, but I love doing it. I am being paid to talk about things I find interesting, with students who — if I am good at my job — I can get interested in things I find interesting. Nothing stimulates my thought like trying to figure out how to convey effectively the points I want the students to learn. And I enjoy the students and their enthusiasms (when they have them, and of course not all do) very much. I do loathe grading, but that's part of the job.

Lastly, there is the dreaded Service. Service is a category that means, the work you do for others (e.g., your institution, your department, your profession) that is necessary to keep things running, but is not teaching or research. I think of it as "the stuff you probably don't want to do but have to do." It is not all bad. But it involves serving on committees, typically. And committee work is often dull, time-consuming work, much of which is not always to any obvious useful end. Even the work that is towards a useful and important end still tends to be dull and time-consuming. So, as an example, I chaired a job search committee for my department last year. This required an immense amount of organizational work, sorting through applications, wrangling other members of the committee (getting academics to do things on time is like herding cats), attending to e-mails and questions from candidates, arranging schedules, and other very tedious things that have nothing really to do with the job of history. But in the end, I got to have a big say in who my future colleagues are, so it at least felt like a worthwhile endeavor in the end (unlike some committees I have been on, which essentially produce nothing). Anyway, I think most people do not really like committee work, but again, if we didn't do it, who would? I try to arrange it so my service work at least feels like it has some kind of major positive advantage for me (e.g., it allows me to have a hand in shaping the future of the department or my professional society, or makes sure that various administrators know who I am and that I am competent), but you don't always get that luxury. When academics complain about their job, 90% of the time they are complaining about service — endless meetings, reports that are written that no one will read, having to deal with difficult colleagues, etc.

Recent graduate with a BA in History here! I specialized in British history during school (wrote my thesis on Queen Victoria and Victorian death culture), but sort of fell into Colonial American history due to my location (NE corridor).

I work part-time in management for an office and spend my other half running a history-related blog (that earns like no money). I don’t plan on pursuing a MA, but if I did, I would go the public historian route. During school, I worked in an archive and for a non-profit that dealt in preservation. I loved both! I also enjoyed teaching, but knew that anything below college-level teaching was not for me and I am not willing pursue a PhD. I find the field very fulfilling and there’s plenty of different roads to travel in it if one sector doesn’t seem to be for you.

My best advice, if you do pursue history in university, is to network as early as possible (make friends with your profs), find an internship as early as possible (or a few! experience is important in history, especially for public historians), and be willing to be flexible (you aren’t going to be making loads of money and will need to work around this).

It’s always interesting to see more answers on this topic, but you might also be interested in some of the previous threads on being a historian.

Because history is so dense, you have to have a specialty which can be very specific. My specialty was music, specifically classical and jazz, although I had a wide knowledge of all music. I was able to work for a few major record companies in their classical/ jazz departments until the recorded music industry collapsed in the late 90s.

Music historians can make a decent living by doing a lot of writing - mostly reviews and liner notes. Every classical recording requires liner notes that tell the history of the music, which requires deeply researching a specific piece of music, as well as that period of the composer's life and times. Every major orchestra also requires a similar description for each work they perform in concert, to be placed in the program handed out to each member of the audience. Then there are reviews of newly released recordings, which is a subject all its own, requiring a knowledge of the history of recordings as well as knowledge of recording techniques and record labels. Reviewers often have a sub-specialty in a particularly specific musical period or composer.

And then there is teaching, of course, mostly at the college level. Music history is seldom taught at the high school level, and if it is, it is usually by the music teacher.

I worked closely with an historian in grad school.

History is as specialized anything else if you continue your studies: history of science; history of philosophy; etc. Every discipline has it's history. I looked at history of philosophy and literature for my MA.

Be prepared to read original texts; the handwriting and scribbling in research libraries, for which you may need special permission. Many schools have their own special documents rooms for graduate students, into which you are escorted and the texts curated along lines of dept interests.

Understanding map creation could be a great start to history of geography. The interests and politics of particular periods would in most interests have influenced maps and perhaps contradicted those of pure discovery. This would be fascinating if one had the persistence to find and read old maps and signs; old ships logs; letters; etc. In literature, some of my friends took particular interests in Old English (like learning foreign language to me); Middle and Modern.

Best wishes as you embark on this exciting path. Teaching on HS level is also a challenge, as many schools immerse students in an historical event by teaching the same one in English, geography, history, etc.