While I don't know about this being allowed, I can answer about why I became a historian.

I've always loved stories, reading them, writing them and telling them. As a kid that was just the way I was and I had different dreams for the future. However when I was about fifteen I realised those other dreams weren't possible and I fell back on something I always loved, the stories of the past. I became interested in figuring out how things were in the past and what happened to people. I went to the open day at what is now my university by chance, and found that the history programme was everything I wanted. And I loved it, now I have a BA and going for my MA.

I specialize in Social History and mostly in the last century. My MA thesis will be on the framing of anti-nuclear energy movements in newspapers. In the end though, I love most periods and fields in history. Which is good because I'll be teaching after finishing my MA and I want to be well rounded in doing that. It's why I like to read this sub as well, the variety of questions keeps you sharp.

I have been interested in History since I was a child. It was my mom who gave me my first books about the subject, and I recall looking at a map of Mexico (my country) and asking my mom why was there a New Mexico in the U. S. and she explained to me that long ago those territories were part of Mexico, so that sparked my interest. In school I liked almost all the subjects but History was definitely my favorite, and while I also thought of becoming a writer or philosopher, I finally chose History for my diploma. I now teach History and the task of making it more interesting for my students has made me love it even more.

I made my thesis essay about a project to build a subway for Guadalajara in the 1970's, for which I studied political, social and economic history. Particularly I'm interested in economic history, because I think the material aspects of society define the overall structure of a country.

I found it interesting that no flaired users had responded here, but a large number of other users had. As a brief public service announcement then to those posting here who love history and consider themselves historians of whatever type: think about getting more involved here! While we expect a fair bit of our flaired community in terms of the answers they provide, one thing we don't expect is formal qualifications at any particular level. As evidenced by any number of amazing flairs (and mods for that matter), degrees and job titles are not at all necessary to write good answers here.

In terms of my own answers to the questions posed, what attracted me to history as a career was scope. Literally no era or facet of human existence was off-bounds - if something exists, it has a history. This sense of freedom and agency started me down the route to getting a PhD, and keeps me going in the academic job hellscape market. There are other upsides too - good colleagues (at the moment at least), good students and the satisfaction of seeing research projects make it out into the world - my first book is coming out later this year, and that's one hell of a thrill. But I won't pretend that the flaws some others here have pointed out about academia aren't real - there are real structural issues that sap some of the joy of doing history from the job. Increasingly, the satisfying bits of doing academic history have become the bits you aren't paid for.

In terms of this site, I write many fewer 'essays' than some on the mod team - stuff that I can just write about off the top of my head comes up relatively rarely, and I don't have huge amounts of time to research for answering here. It doesn't help that most of my secondary interests (I teach advanced courses on Nazism and the Holocaust, for instance) are areas in which several other flairs and mods simply have better knowledge than I, so I tend to leave it to them. However, I do put in a fair amount of time to moderation - it helps that I'm a new enough mod that it doesn't really feel like work yet, so it has become part of my procrastination rota. The flair/mod community is a really big positive here (see above re getting involved...), and softens the hard edges of having to deal with, well, Reddit. We all believe in the mission though - that many if not most people will take good history over bad if they are given the option. It can be really heartening to see discourse here on the sub start to change the wider conversation - u/Iphikrates is fighting a one-mod war against the misuse of Sparta on Reddit and winning. For me at least, part of the point of doing history is communicating it - that's why I like teaching so much - and there's really no better online platform for doing that than here.

I'm not quite a formal historian yet, but I'm in college right now and currently deciding which area to focus my studies on :)

I just love history- that's honestly the best way I can describe it. It always strikes me how something that happened thousands of years ago could set off a chain of events ultimately affecting us even today. Call it analyzing data for patterns, or cause and effect or whatever, I just call it the Story of Humanity. I'm a hopeless romantic at heart too, and while that's not to say that I don't appreciate the many struggles and hardships that people in the past experienced, I do especially enjoy reading history as a story of great achievements and great people. There are so many ways to read history, and really they're all important in my mind.

As for favorite time period, it's gotta be the Ancient world through the Middle Ages. I know the latter term applies differently in different areas of the world, but I do mean the European one in this case. I can't help it, it's just so fascinating.

I'm not a historian by trade or degree, so I apologize if I'm not someone who should be answering this question. I've answered a few questions here and there related to Japanese history, usually older history and related to military or martial art matters. Reason for that is because that's what I've focused on for the last 20ish years, all for a single purpose: to define a lineage.

The martial arts (budo) I study are associated with ninja, bearing names like Togakure Ryu, Gyokko Ryu, Koto Ryu, Kukishin(den) Ryu, and so forth. In the martial arts community, there are what get called gendai martial arts (現代, literally "present era" but translated as "modern martial arts") and koryu martial arts (古流, literally "old flow" but "flow" here is "ryu" which is translated as "school" a lot in martial arts, so it's "old school"...). The arts I study are labelled koryu with extensive lineages going back over 1,000 years, but the koryu community does not acknowledge them as such because no scrolls have been submitted as proof of originating before 1868, the school names have not been found in documents prior to 1868, or a combination of the two. To make things worse, the lineages in the arts I study include major historical figures like Minamoto Yoshitsune, Otomo Tabito and Otomo Yakamochi, Nawa Nagatoshi, and others, and no other major work in Japanese history that we're aware of acknowledges them as being associated with the martial arts I study. Those arts also referenece "scrolls" / teachings that would predate modern Japanese history.

You can imagine how this might look to a historian if you were to say something along the lines of "the martial arts I study are steeped in the founding of Japan, itself... and they're ninja!"

So I started to dig. And dig. And dig some more. And the process is a lot like any science: we may not know the existence of something, directly, but if you look at everything happening around it, realizations and theories start to appear. You notice that a single line in the Nihongi related to one family maps to an entirely separate incident in another document by time/place but not function. For example, one line has an Emperor sending "professors in the art of war" to all provinces to engage in military trainins (『日本書紀』巻三〇持統七年（六九三）十二月丙子《廿一》◆十二月丙辰朔丙子。遣陣法博士等教習諸國), then another document mentions members of several families engaging in such practices at that time in locations referenced in the lienages, and another document implies those teachings morph into the foundation of all Japanese martial arts, and another document shows how two "successors" in a lineage actually knew each other at the proper time and place.

But that phrase, "professors in the art of war" (jinho hakushi 陣法博士) causes problems because in the historical martial arts community, the oldest martial art in Japan is considered Ogasawara Ryu (小笠原流) dating back to the late 12th century AD. Because "proof" doesn't exist elsewhere (in theory), no other school can be that old, especially the martial art schools I study. The koryu community won't allow it or consider it. Historians acknowledge there may have been schools or teachings because documents have people acknowledging "skill" with a sword or spear, but without a document containing a school's name, it didn't exist. Thus a "professor in the art of war" couldn't possibly be a martial art master or head of a "school" (ryu) or anything like that, conceptually speaking or not, because to the koryu community, such a thing does not exist.

That was the real driver of my study and continued study. It requires studying the foundation of Japan, itself, from Jomon through the Sengoku Jidai, requires studying the history of China from the North/South Dynasties through the Mongol invasion, requires studying trade, diplomacy, the origin of the Japanese language, old and unused languages and ideographs like kamimyoji, studying the history of other martial arts and who traveled where and when, heavy heavy study into all the esoteric teachings of the time (buddhism in japan and china, daoism, onmyodo, shinto, "ko-shinto", etc), and most importantly it requires an open mind to consider possibility.

And then, after 20 years, all I have to show for it are potential paths connecting everything together. But to the koryu community who says our martial arts are "made up," it doesn't matter. You can find a black hole via the absence of light and how gravity pulls light around it in; to fixated koryu historians, the gravity of the history and its effect on the surroundings don't even warrant "it's a possible theory." I understand why considering the magnitude of such an acknowledgment in the realm of Japanese martial arts, but still. If one legitimate document talks about family of Otomo Tabito (a major historical figure) as assassins using fighting techniques and "witchcraft" (maho, 魔法) in the 8th century, and that ties in to Otomo Yakamochi's poems (super super famous poet in Japan) about masurao, and teachings trace back to a buddhist monk from China (Ganjin, also super super famous) to literally install buddhism in Japan... and those family members were on the same ship as Ganjin, and serving as diplomats for the imperial court in China... maybe some credence should be given to ideas surrounding their martial art lineage and the depth associated with it.

That's just my opinion, at least. Until someone can discover the needed "document proof" (impossible because the concept of a named "ryu" didn't exist in the 8th century), I continue to study and search. At the very least, I can point out that the connections in the lineages exist in time/place and are soooo complex across various documents that either the guy who "made it up" was a historical paragon or the historical "gravity" shows that there's something real to it. Either way, it's enlightening and alive instead of dead and fixed like the gendai/koryu community history stuff is. History should be ever open to change and evolution, to possibility, don't you think?

I loved expanding my horizons, and history as a field of study was great for that.

After earning a masters and Ph.D., I became a professor and found that I really did not like the way that history operated in academia. The discipline cannot see the forest for the trees, and increasingly gets caught up in "well, actually" minutiae rather than the elements of history that make it interesting and important. It is a discipline that should be vital to the public good but actively chooses to undermine it's relevancy, and I couldn't stand that. I left for a career in improving education on a general level and haven't looked back.

So I find this a fascinating question. I've actually had it open for nearly a day while I thought about what I'd write, or even if I should. After all, I'm not a historian nor do I write awesome essays on history. BUT there is a question for mods there, and how can I resist poking my head in.

First , I want to join /u/Crrpit in a public service announcement. I see tons of people commenting in here! That’s great! Titles and degrees aren’t needed to contribute here. Look at me! There’s tons of ways you can help contribute to the community and earn flairs, credit, renown and praise. Save your favorite posts or questions to put in the digest. Go for a FAQ Finder Flair and link awesome old answers to new question. Take a crack at writing an answer. Do no question’s show up in your field? NO PROBLEM! Post it in the Saturday Showcase, a Tuesday Trivia, or one of the many Floating Features. Still want something a bit more specific? Drop a line to the mod team and we can… arrange things and have that perfect question appear.

Honestly one of the best things you can do to help the mod team and community is use that report button. You see something that doesn’t belong, don’t post a comment saying it’ll get deleted. Hit report instead and keep us high quality.

If you're a moderator, what keeps you motivated to … work so hard to maintain the community This is the bit that can really apply to me, and about the only part I feel qualified to answer. Hopefully you’ll enjoy a random post from a random mod.

Like pretty much everyone here I love history. I love learning new things, and perhaps the best thing about AskHistorians is the way you can learn so much on topics you think you knew pretty well. Seriously, I thought I had a pretty good handle on certain events, but every time I see a new post I learn something new. PLUS I get exposed to all kinds of history I’d legitimately never even thought about before.

Ages ago I started putting some work into the digest, just to show my thanks to people. I had no expectations about flairs or anything, but I look at it like this. It costs ~$14 bucks to go to the movies up my way. A movies going to entertain me for an hour and a half to two hours. So that 14 bucks is worth roughly two hours of entertainment as far as I’m concerned. Then I log onto AH. I spend hours here. Pure enjoyment. I read quote a lot of posts. Not only is reading the posts enjoyable, but there’s all kinds of knock on effects. I’ll spend even more hours talking about history with friends and family, sharing some incredible stories. It helps continue my education. It helps polish me up and keep my brain working and exercising.

So if $14 bucks is two hours of entertainment, then putting a few hours into making a digest to thank people is a steal. Seriously, look at these amazing experts willing to put so much time in to writing about history and their favorite events. Then being a mod comes along. Adding a few more hours to keep this community healthy and running, and yet it’s still outnumbered by the hours of enjoyment I get out of it. I’m still getting my moneys worth. Plus it’s hardly the only hobby I sink time into, but it’s one of the hobbies I’m most proud of. I don’t write awesome essays but I certainly feel like I’m contributing to a kick ass community.

I guess it boils down to this; You folks keep me motivated to put so much work into this sub. The writers, the askers, the lurkers, everyone in the community. The Digest is my way of paying back those awesome folks who write answers. To try and share their work even further so it get’s just a tenth of the appreciation I think it actually deserves. The mod work is me working to pay back the whole community.

Plus I have to admit, it’s pretty fun.

/rant.

I only have a B.A in History so I don't know if can call myself a "historian," but I've really like the topic since I was little. I think it started with reading about Greek Myths and those -ology books like Egyptology.

Now that I am graduated, I am continuing to read various works with eyes on entering graduate school (not quite sure for what yet, though). I focused my degree in modern East Asia which complimented my Japanese language studies and the two helped build reciprocal interest in each other for me. Now I have work published by a local museum and currently work as essentially a low-level government employee in Japan.

Living in the region makes the history especially interesting for me and I can use it as a way to break the ice when meeting people here as well as better understand my surroundings. Additionally, since it is modern history it does help to contextualize much of what is going and being said around me.

Speaking more about the history itself, I really enjoy studying international relations and cultural exchange so Japan as a means of understanding and expanding my interests to East Asia more broadly has worked really well since it absorbed and adapted foreign ideas and were guided by these ideas in their activities in the region, simultaneously reflecting modern trends while contributing to them through their own influence and interpretations. Additionally, learning about how these ideas, from Meiji to the end of the Pacific War (although I especially like the Bakumatsu and Taisho periods), were brought in and interpreted by, as well as reacted to, on the mainland has led to me to start learning Korean as well. I really enjoy the challenge that the linguistic and cultural complexity of East Asia adds to studying the area's history.

I especially like the role of nationality laws in states and wrote my thesis on the laws concerning Koreans living in a region of NE China after Japan's annexation of Korean and how these laws were connected to nationality laws in the later puppet state of Manchukuo.

I fell into it bass-akwards, having to begin by getting past a hatred of the subject brought by school overfocusing on WWII (still no interest...) to realizing I had spent years listening to folk music and looking up references, reading the English, French, Canadian, American, and Russian literary canons back to the 1800s out of a weird sense of needing to fix my deficient education in references no one actually makes any more (and researching all the stuff in those books I didn't know), and working out places I'd been as an exchange student that didn't speak the language...yeah, I was a bit of a dolt.

Anyway, as to why I write essays for free, I guess it comes down to that I like sharing what I knew. When I first got here, I was amazed anyone wanted to listen to me go on about my interests--in real life, precisely no one cares, at all. It was an outlet. Plus, my field isn't wildly popular, and I definitely don't answer everything I could (and for a few years, life was such that I wasn't answering at all. Plus, now that I've finally gotten myself into a Master's program in history, I find answering questions here useful for school. Returning to school after 13 years, more than 15 after my last history essay and faced with my first, at the master's level no less, I was stumped. It wasn't until I pretended to be answering a question on AH that I actually figured out how to structure a response. So I learn as much here as I have taught readers, maybe still more of a learner in the end.

Not a historian by profession, but i love history. It started (i think) with a kiddie version retelling of the Homeric stories. That made me want to learn more a out Greece. In the short fun-facts book my parents then got me about Ancient Greek History there was a very short passage a out Rome. This made me want to learn about that, and it snowballed from there. My favorite time period to learn about is the Middle Ages and 18th Century, and my favorite topic is Chinese History (During the imperial phase)

I am currently a historian-in-training as I have decided to term myself. I am pursuing my undergraduate degree in history and plan on pursuing a Masters/PhD as well. I have loved history for as long as I can remember for many reasons, but the big one is that it’s the story of who, why, and how we are a world today. Humanity is fascinating to me. I want to know everything about everyone I come across, and I find that through learning the history of my own and other cultures I can start to piece together some of those stories. For me, history is a reflection of humanity. Humans as a whole are so beautifully messy. We are broken, mean, cruel, and horrible, but we are also awe inspiring, intelligent, kind, and magnificent. I’m biased as it’s my field, but I think history is the end all be all of the studies of humans. Through the study of the past and how it has led us to today we can tell so much. Sometimes it’s hard to study the past like when we have to grapple with the atrocities of mankind as in the genocides and colonialism of the past, but in the past, we also get to see the happiness in the sheer brilliance of what humans have achieved in our relatively short time here on Earth. History, just like humans, has lightness in all of the dark places. That’s what keeps me going and gets me through having essays and research proposals due too often for my liking. I currently think I would like to specialize in the history of science in my Masters/PhD level work, but I am still considering where to go further within that field. It’s a big area, but i’m dying to get started.

I've been interested in social history in general and fashion history in specific since I was a kid - in third grade, I once did a presentation on the layers of an eighteenth-century woman's dress. While I also had strong interests in archaeology and historical linguistics, I ended up deciding after undergrad that I'd rather work in a museum than excavate, so I went to a master's program on fashion history and museum skills.

What's interesting to me about historical fashion is that, while the aesthetics are fantastic, there's so much there beyond them - the question of who was able to afford what and how well they could keep up with changing styles (far more complex than the typical idea that "only rich people had anything nice, everyone else wore whatever they could get their hands on), the actual methods used and why, specific garments that can be attributed to specific people and what they tell us. There are connections to art history/decorative arts, politics, class, gender roles, international trade, colonialism ... It's a rich field.

One of the things that motivates me to contribute to AskHistorians as much as I do is that I love learning, and a decent number of the questions I answer require me to do more than explain things I already know. But that's mainly because a decent number of the questions I answer aren't technically in the field where I can be considered a legit historian. The beauty of AH is that it offers you the opportunity and support to take off in a new direction if you so choose: there are a lot of questions here that go unanswered because there isn't anybody around who knows the answer. Because I wanted to be able to answer more questions, I started studying women's history (generally 1600-1950) in greater depth, and then specialized further into "powerful women", ranging from actively reigning queens to aristocratic wives to the upper middle class, depending on the setting.

What motivates me to mod is that it feels good to maintain the community in a way that I know brings joy to other users. For every frothing complaint, we get ten compliments.

Follow up: Do any of you get anything out of this? Credits from a course, reputation, or something else other than the satisfaction of a good post?

It was largely by accident. I was working at a hotel on night shift after finishing my masters and bored as hell. So I started funding a part-time doctorate that built on my masters dissertation.

Fast forward over five years of work, and I kind of wish I hadn't bothered. Having to pay and work for the doctorate has basically absorbed all my cash and time in my twenties. It's interesting enough what I do, but the rewards have been nowhere near worth the effort expended.

Because I like it. I have always liked history and when i was down to choosing my career after finishing high school (where I am from we don't go to college after high school but rather go straight to our chosen career at Uni), I decided to go for something I liked and I was good at (History) rather than something I was good at but with 'meh' levels of interest.

I did my BA in History, a MA in Modern History and I'm pushing forward to start a PhD. I've sort of specialised in Modern conflict, personal stories during war time and World Wars. As to why I am interested in these topics... No idea. It is a very rewarding discipline, as sometimes you find things that quite literally change history and our understanding of an event . That being said, it can be a very frustrating discipline as well. You have to put a fuckload of effort doing research and reading just to find something interesting and sometimes all the effort might be for nothing.

I enjoy it a lot but I understand why it is not for everybody as it takes a lot of patience, endurance and -in my honest personal opinion- several screws loose.

I'm an Egyptologist/Classicist, and it's quite cheesy to admit it, but to be honest I originally got interested in the field becsuse of the Percy Jackson books. My school had a programme where if you were a new Y7 pupil, in your first week you would choose a book from a list, and they'd send you a free copy to read. I picked Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief because it just sounded cool. It got me hooked on Greek mythology. I ended up devouring that book series, and the next, which was entirely based on Egypt. I realised how much I adored mythology and ran with it. Then I picked up a book called Secrets of Egyptology as a school fete and loved it, it was all about archaeology and mummification and I'd never been so fascinated. It kind of pinged a memory deep in my brain from when I was very small, and looking at an encyclopedia that we had in my house. I couldn't read but I liked the pictures, and in one of them there was a photo of a mummy - back then when my mum told me it was a mummy I didn't understand, I thought she meant it was someone's mum. Anyway, that was my first memory of Egyptology, but it was the Rick Riordan books that started the passion.

I originally went to university to study classical studies, having written off Egyptology as a hobby as not many places even did ancient history let alone Egyptian. I didn't even know my university offered the course when I went to see them, but I realised as soon as I got there that I didn't want to study classics. I wanted to learn everything I could about Egypt, the language, the religion, I wanted to just learn everything. I still enjoy the topic now because I don't think I'll ever stop learning about it. I focus on Graeco-Roman Egypt, so I still keep a bit of that classical influence, but I adore the rich cultural history of Egypt, the completely unique and sometimes bonkers theology, and the exquisite architecture and iconography. I love working with artefacts, holding in my hand something that a pharaoh may have held millenia ago. It still blows my mind. I finished my BA last year and I'm currently preparing to write my MA thesis before going onto a PhD (funding dependent). If the PhD doesn't work out, I have a few museum jobs lined up.

I was a social studies education major that didn’t like kids, so history with minors in political science and languages was the path I chose. I study early modern political polemics, specifically Dutch contracts and the evolution of language as influenced by pamphlets and propaganda (how official documents change over time based on the demands of the common people). I have a side project in baseball history that looks at the same “problem” when it comes to the evolution of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.