I am currently an undergraduate in history, planning to graduate next fall. This means that I am currently looking at options for after graduation, ranging from graduate school (I already know the problems with that route, which is why I am asking this) to writing outside of academia. Despite my uncertainty, I am absolutely certain that I want to be able to do history somehow, by which I mean researching and writing, actively contributing to scholarship in some form or another. I am absolutely in love with and dedicated to the idea of ‘doing’ history, not just reading and learning about it.
What I want to know is the feasibility of doing this outside of academia: is graduate school and a career in teaching/research the only feasible way of publishing respectable history? To what extent does my ability to be published depend on having an academic title/position rather than the content of my work, and to what extent could the content of my work conceivably meet academic standards with only an undergraduate education, even with a good understanding of the principals of research and historiography, is that feasible?
is graduate school and a career in teaching/research the only feasible way of publishing respectable history?
No. Peer review is blind, if you have the skills, know the literature inside and out, and have a ton of free time in which you can do intensive work unpaid (which often includes a lot of travel to access non-digitised primary sources), you could theoretically write papers and get them published. Theoretically is a big distinction. You get a ton of support from being a member of an institution.
Undergraduates getting papers published isn't that uncommon, but it's usually accomplished with a ton of support from their faculty. I have a friend who adapted their undergraduate thesis into an academic-press published book that completely upended paradigms in that specific area.
Getting into opinion here: it's not worth it. It is work. A lot of it. For most of the people publishing stuff, it's a full-time job and then some.
You can still write history without writing academic history. You reach a wider audience too, as most papers are, sad as it may be, hardly ever read by anyone. It's much easier to get a popularly-geared history paper published in a litmag or something than it is to get an academic article published in a good journal, and your knowledge on the topic can be way less intensive, so you can write about a much broader array of things.
But if you're set on engaging in academic history specifically, then yeah, possible, but I hope you have a passive income stream, basically. And if you have the means to do so, then you've probably got the cash to go to grad school, anyway.