Hello! I apologize if this isn't the right place to post this question (and if not, please delete!), but I'm doing a lot of research into a potential career change, and I wanted some professionals opinions.
I'm currently an attorney that focuses on civil litigation. I've always been a history "enthusiast," with a particular interest in the middle ages. The thing I like about being an attorney is the research, writing, and opportunity to teach people about things they didn't know before.
I've recently been reading a lot more, and I've been brainstorming some ideas on things I would like to write about related to my historical interests. I'm not a trained historian, so I'm sure this wouldn't be that useful of an exercise at this point. So this got me thinking about going back to school and getting an MA in history and then potentially continuing on to a PhD program if that suit me.
I'm not worried about cost because I'm fortunate enough that that isn't an issue. but I wanted to ask /r/askhistorians about what beginning this career path would potentially look like, how a person could come into this from another career, and whether it's even a recommended course of action. In case it's relevant, I'm 28.
Before going to grad school ask: just what kind of a career as an historian am I seeking?
If you want to teach at a college or university level, then graduate work is necessary. But a fair number of folks -- including more than a few lawyers -- enjoy careers as "independent scholars"; history tends to sell quite well, and most popular histories aren't written by academic historians.
So, for example, Antony Beevor has a military background -- did study at Sandhurst, but no graduate degree that I'm aware of . . . he's sold many millions of books, and does good research. You won't mistake his work for that of, say, Anthony Grafton-- but I don't know that going to grad school would have helped him particularly in the kind of books he likes to write and his audience likes to read.
Similarly Alison Weir-- she taught history in secondary school, but doesn't have training as an academic historian.
And lawyers-- lots of lawyers write history or have careers in it without a graduate degree in history. At the most academic level, law schools have places for legal historians who quite often only have law degrees- for example David Seipp at Boston University Law School, a leading expert in medieval English law. Similarly Victor Kattan is an international lawyer who has written extensively on the history of the Middle East, without so far as I'm aware any graduate study specifically as an historian- though he does have a PhD from the Law School at the School of Oriental and African Studies. And at a less academic level quite a few lawyers have used their research and writing skills to just start writing about topics that interested them
When contemplating a career change, it's often a good idea to take a look at someone who's got the kind of career you'd like to have and ask "how did s/he get there?" It's also a good idea to look at employment prospects-- getting an academic appointment in history today is tough; and a realistic understanding of what the academic career looks like is necessary. There are lots of places you can do a PhD; fewer that will grant you a PhD that you're likely to be hired with.
So it really all depends on what you want to write about, what skills you already have and what you hope to do with it afterwards. If you want to write about, say, the economy of Italian city states in the Renaissance, there's a lot you'd get out of graduate work, a framework to learn necessary paleographical and cliometric skills, and a network of scholars who work in quite difficult archives. If you want to write books about Civil War generals . . . hard to say you need a PhD. James Macpherson has one, Shelby Foote didn't -- and while you can see the difference in their respective works, Foote sold just fine and had the life he wanted.
See:
Palmer, Ben W. “The Historian and the Lawyer.” American Bar Association Journal, vol. 32, no. 9, 1946, pp. 530–536.
Wise, Hugh III. "From Trial Lawyer to Historian". The Docket, November 2017