Hey OP! Hope you are good! It’s my first time answering a question here, and I hope I don’t break any rules. But I’ll try my best!

I’m currently working on my masters degree on History of Human Rights as a a primary subject. Besides our main interests are far different, I think I can contribute as someone who work in the field about 6 years here in Latin America.

First of all, learning history as a hobby is really different when you made this as a job decision. For this, you’ll need compromise with a university and for that, maybe 3/4 years of research, or even more, that’s depends where you’re from and what you have in mind. Want a good pay check? You’ll need a master or even a PhD on history.

Being a historian is far deeper than learn as a hobby. You’ll learn how to make a properly investigation of your field of interest and also all the others too. Have in mind that you’ll learn about methodology, application and probably will read a little about “everything” (also everything is impossible, but let’s take that as an example) as modern and contemporary history.

From there, you have some options. But realistic speaking, is about teaching and doing research most of the time.

If you don’t see yourself teaching in a university (where mostly you’ll have a good financial return) you can work as a librarian, archivist, in a museum or even aim for production of documentary’s, as a TV consultor and many more. As an example, my wife is a historian with a PhD about horror movies and work in a podcast.

It’s a long way, and a lot of times is kinda hard. But what job isn’t?

I wish the best for you and I hope I answer some of your questions. If you have some more, feel free to ask me!

Edit: And sorry for my bad English! (Words are hard yet)

It truly depends on what area of the “historian” profession you’d like to be in. I was in public history (museum) for a bit and honestly rn the industry is crashing because of covid. What you could always do is freelance work; translating manuscripts, genealogy, etc. These things you can search for online and find either freelance or part time work in. You could also try being an archivist which can be part of public history or private organizations. Teaching is another thing, which you’d need a degree for but colleges would hire a specific subset of history like classics (you mention roman) or ancient middle east (you mentioned judea) separately as they are rather distinct periods and cultures.

Personally i decided to get away from history as my career and move to teaching. I like it as a hobby much better now and i can make an actual living.

Sorry if this is not the response you wanted but there are definitely options out there for you.

I have two history degrees (undergrad/grad school) but my answer may differ slightly from the others. History is an amazing passion to have, but when you devote the necessary time in academia in order to become successful it is very easy to burnout. What you may have enjoyed before now becomes incredibly tedious (bibliographies stretching into oblivion, working with difficult advisors in your area of interest). The sheer amount of writing involved in this discipline can easily destroy a formerly beloved passion. History does not offer the same job opportunities, security, or salary as many other professions that also require graduate degrees. You may spend the necessary time devoted to your degree(s), but this is a highly competitive field, again with little job security (especially at the moment with covid-19 and how undervalued the humanities are overall in our society).

This is not to say that you don't have what it takes (given that you already have an impressive degree) but you may find that you need to go back to school in order to pursue teaching or other entry-level jobs in the field.

I recommend auditing classes at a nearby university, you may get the "fix" that you're craving on your own terms- you get to pursue your passion at a relatively low cost and enrich yourself and others in the course while maintaining the lifestyle you already have achieved. Bonus if you connect well with a nearby professor/ specialist in your area. I've seen auditor/professor relationships that were tremendously fulfilling for both parties. I had auditors in my classes who had successful careers outside of the discipline and were EXTREMELY knowledgable about the course topics, oftentimes they were second to the professor (who would sometimes rely on them for random knowledge given their extreme level of interest). This ideally would be your outlet for a few hours every other day/week depending.

If you build a relationship with a professor (well known within the discipline), audit their classes, and grow to learn more about your area of interest, you could potentially contribute research/writing to all kinds of projects. Auditors can contribute research papers and project proposals for courses, author books relating to their interests, sometimes even submit papers for publication in scholarly journals. And again, this is all on your own terms.

I have two degrees in history. My advice would be to think about how you would apply your historical knowledge. Do you want to teach? Write articles and books? Translate historical documents? Support a museum? You really want to consider what you will do if you focus on history. Maybe even consider reaching out to people in the field (teachers, authors) who can give you some feedback on what it's like in the field. You always have your other degree and experience as backup, but before you make a major shift, I would really consider what you want the end goal to be.

It is great you have an identified area of interest. If you do go back for history specific education, I recommend looking into who are the top historians in that area right now. You may want to go to their school and form a partnership with them in your degree pursuit. Or they may just be a great colleague for you to work with as you progress in your career.

There are many avenues you can take, but it would be wise to have a solid idea of what you want to do and understand more about that environment by connecting with people who live it firsthand.

Best of luck!

I want to echo what others have to say and add that it helps if you're willing to be a poor nomad. You'll likely need a PhD, but that also may not be enough. Most historians have to go to at least one post-doc after their 5+ year degree and even then getting that vaunted tenure-track job is an uphill battle. Once you get it, especially in a narrow field like yours, you have to take it to have a career, even if it's someplace you don't want to live.

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If you want to teach, then you can go the community college route, but be warned, cc profs make less than most public school teachers.

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Frankly, I'm finishing my PhD at an Ivy League university and planning to leave the formal profession because the job market and the conditions are terrible. My advice (and my advice to those who have asked me about applying to grad programs) is keep it as a hobby. Even universities don't value humanists, despite what they may claim.

More than it might be anything else, academia is a business model wherein cash is exchanged for products that have economic value. Whether those products are students taught, papers published, or books written, the whole of the enterprise is ultimately concerned with connecting people, organizations, and governments that have money with work that they want this money to support. The romanticization of the field at this point is little more than a relic of earlier times when there was more demand for teaching from more students, and a time before that when we were at least more honest about a need to be independently wealthy to explore history.

Based on what you have written here, I think the questions that you need to be asking yourself are:

• Is there something that I want to do with the knowledge of Roman Judea that I want to learn that can be exchanged for other people's money? For example, through teaching, writing thinly disguised religious apology, or informing cultural resource management?
• Would I be happy while exchanging this labor for pitiful amounts of money?
• Is it plausible that I could get a position exchanging money for this labor while competing with the overabundance of desperate PhDs with brighter red lines through their CVs and the coming tsunami of established historian professors who are being laid-off from their failing liberal arts institutions?
• How willing/able am I to move to wherever a job happens to be?
• ...or do I just want to learn and share?

A career is something that exists when people or institutions with money provide that money in exchange for labor that they value. If a career is something that you want to seek, what you need to do is follow that money and the value that it is exchanged for, rather than your passions.

In academia, broadly, professors can attract the funding needed for their departments to pay them through grants, commercial work, and teaching undergraduates. In this kind of field, there is essentially no grant money, effectively no commercial work that professors are generally qualified to perform, and way fewer undergrads taking history courses than there used to be. Writing papers about historical subjects in specialized journals used to be an indirect way to pay the bills by demonstrating your qualifications as an expert worthy to teach paying undergrads.

None of this though is stopping you from learning Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and/or Latin (ideally at least two), delving into the topic in a real way, or contributing to scholarship once you have meaningful expertise. You just need to fund it yourself with your real job.

History professor here. Honestly, there’s one history profession: history professor. Museum work, archiving, etc., are history-adjacent, but not history per se, which is why they almost always require additional training (certification, etc.). I also think you’d be bored in them with at least one advanced degree - you’d probably be far better-degreed than your coworkers.

History is about reading and researching history, then writing and teaching it. In order to be a history professional, you’ll need to either be independently wealthy or employed as a professor or researcher (good luck with the latter). This will require a PhD or equivalent degree, plus fluency in the language(s) of the culture(s) in which you wish to specialize. You’ll need a good resident program (nobody in the humanities takes online seriously), which will take a minimum of 5 years. You’ll also need to find a school that specializes in what you want to study, both its program and its faculty. For example, if you want to study Roman history, you’ll need a school with a Latin program - most don’t have them anymore. Then, you’ll need to read the field(s) and develop your niche. If you want to go Classical, that might involve archaeology, which is also history-adjacent and may require more education/training. Once you start publishing, people will notice your work, and you may get on a faculty. You’ll then keep researching and publishing in your specialty area as well as engaging with the field and cultivating new scholars, if possible.

Fair warning: the academic job market is awful. The average historian spends 5 years between earning a PhD and first job. Many don’t get that opportunity. Teaching also eats up a lot of time. If you don’t want to teach, then you can’t be in humanities academia.

As others have suggested, the hobbyist route is much easier, especially if you don’t want to publish regularly. Most people become interested in history as they age anyway.

My advice would be to cultivate your interest and start building your historiography now. Look up syllabi for advanced courses in subjects you’re interested in and read the texts (you’ll start to notice patterns). If you decide you really love it, start emailing professors and see if they’d be willing to take you on. Otherwise, just keep reading and become a kickass amateur historian/hobbyist.

I have a BA in History (medieval and ancient) and a MEd in History Education (about 5 grad history classes), I graduated not too long ago (less than 10 years ago) and my history professor/mentor/adviser basically said, if you are okay with moving anywhere in the country, okay with living in poverty for potentially a decade while watching your peers progress (get houses, $$, fancy cars, vacations, etc.) they would connect me with people in the field of my interest (medieval history). I decided I wanted to start my life.

I very briefly researched Library Science and Public History, but the problem is that there are so few jobs in this area.

I ended up going into teaching and finished my M.Ed a few years ago. I have people from my cohort who still haven't found jobs as a history teacher, and this is for 6th-12th grade.

History teaching at all levels is ridiculously competitive, like hundreds of applicants for every open position.

I'd say stick with your current area and just take classes for fun.

Maybe just try a Public History MA, reading history isn't the same as academia, but I am sure you know that from your time in engineering school

You've already got a lot of very valuable responses with a lot of good things being said, but it appears to me that they may have missed your point a little bit. I just recently finished an MA in ancient history, specifically the Roman Empire in which I tangentially studied some parts of fourth century Jewish history! And at my university there were a couple of people who seem to be in a similar boat to what you're thinking of doing. One in particular was a lawyer, I believe quite successful. Also not sure of her age, but I'd guess in her 40s. Like you feel, she decided she's had enough of the hard-work-for-lots-of-money and wanted to follow her passion, so she applied and went into a PhD in history. She was part way done when I finished, and she was living the hell out of her best life. She also studied Roman history, and would regularly combine grant money with her own money to take her and her husband to Italy to spend time in archives there, but also travel the countryside. I think, for her, she definitely made the right decision. It wasn't quite an early retirement, as she was receiving funding money for her PhD, but it was definitely a big pay cut, but all worth it.

As a lot of other posters have mentioned, you've got to decide what you actually want to get out of studying history, or what you want to achieve. Do you want to conduct original research and publish a monograph on important historical issues? Do you want to teach history classes? Do you want to make a second financially viable career out of history? I think you've got to define some goals for yourself; the more specific the goals are, the better advice you can receive. Making a financially viable career out of history is difficult for everyone at the moment, and only getting more difficult. I agree with what professor Lurkerbot said, almost all professional historians are professors or trying to be professors. History-adjacent careers are super valuable, but academia is one of the only industries were historians are paid directly to research, publish, and teach history. As I am in the academia path, I don't know much about history-adjacent fields and what they require, so my advice is tailored for academia, and I would say the best path to achieving the goals I mentioned is through higher research degrees. A PhD if you can get accepted straight into one, or a Master of Arts/Master of Philosophy and then a PhD. These courses will put you in close contact with other experts who can help refine your knowledge, skills, and ideas, and nothing helps more on a history resume than a completed PhD. A lot of institutions and publishers will automatically dismiss someone who does not have a PhD, which is not the healthiest or best way to go about it, but it happens. Someone else mentioned part-time as an option, which I agree with. The part-timers at my institution did not seem to be able to have the same level of engagement as us full-timers. I barely met the part-timers, they were not involved in things like the journal we published or the conference we organised, so there is definitely something lost in part-time. But in the end, the degree is the most important element, and if part-time is the best way for you to achieve that, go for it.

As for what you can do over the next 5-10 years, 2-3 hours a day. I would say, whether you start learning tomorrow or in a couple of years, the number one thing you can do for yourself if you want to get a PhD, is to learn ancient languages. If you want to study Roman Judea, you will need to have fluent reading skills in Latin, Ancient Greek, German, French or Italian, and I would guess also (Ancient?) Hebrew, and potentially Syriac and/or Aramaic. Definitely something you will want to figure out by looking at potentially PhD programs and talking to professors at those institutions. Five or six ancient languages is tough to learn, but you don't need to be conversational in them. You just need to be able to read them, not even write in them (usually), and when it comes to your PhD language exams most institutions will allow you to have a dictionary for the modern languages.

Other than languages, continue reading in the fields you're interested in, the more recently published the better. Also try to go to conferences that have topics that interest you. They are great places to meet people in the field. My final advice would be not to rush this, keep working your corporate job and save up, invest what you save. Goodluck and feel free to ask any more questions!

A lot of good advice here. Just to add- you could consider doing a Master’s Degree part-time. That’s something that, if you were self-funded, you could really complete at your own pace. I learned more in my first term than I had through my whole undergraduate experience. How to ‘read’ (and not read) primary and secondary sources, the arguments and debates in my field, and the ‘big’ important texts I needed to know. Preparing articles for publication and speaking at conferences all honed my skills that I still call upon today. It helps to have professional guidance, university backing, and full access to academia.

When I took my first masters it was at a State University (in the US) where the average age of the student body skewed older. There were quite a few people in my cohort in a similar situation as you- they were switching careers or scratching those itches. Doing the degree part time allowed them to just take one or two classes a term and focus on the individual research and readings whilst working their full time jobs.

In my career as an academic so far, one point I would like to highlight with the academic study of history is the specialisation required. You can't just study all of Roman history, for example - many professors will specialise on the reign of a few successive emperors, looking at a particular aspect of roman society in that time. You start broad when beginning studying at university and then focus in on a very particular slice of time and space until you are the global authority on a very niche aspect by the end of a PhD. Just thought this would give you a better idea of what you would be getting into with the studying side of things.

Hey OP - historian here that went so far as to try a PhD, but did not have enough ambition to see it through.

In addition to the excellent advice already given, I want to point out that in order to be able to focus on your area of interest (after having acquired a broad historical knowledge according to the syllabus) you will have to master at least one to two ancient languages to really shine and study Roman and/or Jewish history.

You will have to master at least Latin and - if Jewish history shall be your focus - Hebrew would not hurt. In order to round these two fields, Ancient Greek is also recommended. We are talking about the Mediterranean here and those are the languages that were prominently spoken and which shaped the socio-cultural background of the ancient world/antiquity.

It depends, of course, on what you plan to do with your new degree. For a teaching job and most of the jobs within the public sphere, this is not as mandatory. But if you want to enter the academic field - as u/lurkerbot17561806 outlined before - you have to be able to read the original sources and make up your own mind about them.

(Source: Studied history and had to get a Latin degree as I did not bring it to the table from my school days.)