So if you are interested in looking for buried artifacts or participating in excavations, that would be something to ask archeologists. If you want to know what historians do “9 to 5” so to speak. That really depends on what kind of historian.

Some people (these people are wrong), only consider historians to be PhD holders, in which case they are expected to teach at Universities. They lecture (or have someone lecture for them), they advise students, they also perform research when they can and are expected to publish articles and books in their field.

Now a days, the job market for PhDs is very difficult to stick with due to the low demand for history professors at universities. Often PhDs go outside the field and work in a lot of other roles, including journalism, museum work, or investment banking. As an historian, your chief skills would include research, writing, (hopefully) public speaking, critical thinking, and others. These skills are valuable in a lot of fields.

Many people who pursue history in undergrad or for master’s level degree go in to teaching primary or secondary education.

Public historians have varying levels of education, and can work in museums, historical sites, or do digital work, or even work in television, film, or video games. Museum work at entry level often either involves a lot of person-to-person interaction via tours or other types of public engagement, or you’d be doing a lot of work with collections materials digitally or working with data (collections work is working with artifacts).

It’s really hard to answer this question succinctly because an historian can do so much with the skills and expertise they can cultivate. If you’re heading off to college soon, I’m sure there’s a professor at your institution who would be happy to have this talk with you, or you can start reaching out to your favorite historical institutions to answer your questions. Most of them love being able to help someone navigate the field.

As a PhD student in History, I am in training to become an academic historian preferably at a university, so I can speak a bit to what historians do in academic settings.

Many split their time between teaching, advising, and research. Research can involve archival work (sifting through documents at records centers, e.g. the National Archives at College Park), oral history (interviews with subjects of your historical inquiry), even literary analysis, etc. It really depends on your subject. For my specialty in 20th C. US (roughly speaking), much of what I do is travel to archives to view documents from the time period. It's a mixture of reinterpreting documents that have already been written about by other historians (but perhaps not satisfactorily) and discovering new documents which have not gotten much attention.

I then write about how to interpret and understand the event or time period I'm studying. The end result, hopefully, is a deeper explanation that pushes forward our understanding of the past and the world that we have inherited. Traditional professors are usually writing a book or article alongside teaching and advising. You are usually funded by a combination of your university and outside research institutes. As a PhD student, I will be doing some teaching (think TA or intro level courses) and working on my dissertation (which sometimes is the basis for a published book) while I am funded by a university fellowship.

But a history degree there is a lot you can do. Beyond explicitly history related careers, like working as an archivist or research librarian, a training in history can be quite holistic. If you take it seriously you can become a terrific writer with valuable research and critical analysis skills (the constant emphasis on cause and effect and contextual understanding helps this). I want to say nearly a third of the history majors in my undergrad went on to law school afterwards. On a side note, the history of law is a thriving subfield in the United States, and i know many professors who are JD/PhDs. For me, I recognize how difficult it can be to get a traditional tenured professorship nowadays, so I have sought out internships in editorial positions and will be assisting the staff of an academic history journal in the coming months. Essentially, leveraging my writing and editing skills.

Talk to your university's history department, perhaos the head of undergrad studies. You can speak to geaduate students to get their perspectives on obtaining a PhD. I found that speaking to graduating undergrads in history about what they planned to do was very helpful in tracing out what else I could do with a history degree besides go on to get a PhD.

Archaeologist here. In Europe, archaeology is considered a subdiscipline of history, but in the US it's considered a subdiscipline of anthropology. It doesn't make a lot of difference.

Archaeologists are concerned with material culture - What people in the past have made, and use that as a lens to ask questions about past societies, beliefs and relationships.

It doesn't always have to be artefacts and digging things out of the ground. Our built environment and modifications to the landscape are material culture too.

Doctoral candidate from Germany here, I'm going to add a few things:

I am a bit surprised that no one mentioned one quite substantial part of being a historian in an academic setting: dealing with tedious paperwork, sitting in meetings, etc., all completely unrelated to history and preventing you from doing anything "meaningful" for way longer than necessary (in other words, the necessary evils of our contemporary world).

---

Next, concerning languages since others mentioned this. I do medieval Japanese history, which means I am fluent in German (well, mother tongue), English, modern Japanese, and more or less proficient (definitely not fluent...yet!) at classical Japanese and a "variant" of classical Chinese that the educated classes used at the time. So, depending on the field you specialize in, you simply have to learn and know multiple languages to simply be able to handle historical sources - which, from all I know, is a prerequisite for any research at the doctoral level at the latest.

---

Otherwise, concerning "funding" of research I can give an European (German, to be specific) perspective; there's two typical cases:

The first being in a teaching position / professorship at an university, which is pretty much a deal in the form of "we give you a salary and office space as well as access to a variety of resources in return for you teaching." These positions are limited, especially because professorships in Germany are for life, so it takes a little while until a vacancy at the top-level emerges.

The second option is to obtain funding from an organization, of which there are a couple at International, European, national, or private levels, which all provide funding for fixed-length research projects (usually three or four years). This means that part of the job of being a professional historian who wants to do research is to write up research proposals to obtain this kind of funding in the hopes of being more convincing that what you want to do is more "important" than most others - because way more people want money than there is available for spending. This is especially true for historians and other "philosophical" disciplines, because the natural sciences get...yeah, a bigger piece of the cake.