As a preamble, I would like to point out that all historians-in-training (referring here to those going the academic route) usually have a very niche topic/subject chosen as they prepare their first larger research thesis. Answering a historiographically loaded and complicated questions such as, "What caused the outbreak of the First World War?" is not something that you would set out to answer as an undergrad or grad student writing their thesis. Instead, it's smaller but important questions. The fields, therefore, are considerably larger than we might think. As an undergraduate student, I ventured into the field of military, cultural, and social history. A pretty big couple of fields, right? I then took a step further up the pyramid to Vietnam War history. A considerably large field there, too. I then chose a very niche topic to write my undergraduate thesis on: The Kit Carson Scouts during the Vietnam War. These were defectors from the PLAF and PAVN who volunteered to fight for the United States during the war. They are practically a footnote, unheard of unless you're really into Vietnam War history.
A very nice subject to research and write about, right? But historians are not here to just tell stories of the past. We are here to interpret it. A nice subject can tell us a much larger story than we might think. As historians, we are trained in asking specific questions to our sources, and subsequently, our topics. The Kit Carson Scouts, for example, can help answer larger historical questions about the Vietnam War and history at large. Let's take a very big question: "What would make a person change their loyalty during war?" The case of the Kit Carson Scouts do not provide an absolute answer to this question, but it adds a crucial puzzle piece. From there, we take a step further up the pyramid: "Why would a South/North Vietnamese man defect and volunteer to fight alongside their former enemy?" Here, our question is narrowed but still answers an interesting and relevant question for the larger field of Vietnam War history. It holds historiographical relevance, seeing as it pertains to the 'Vietnamese turn' in Vietnam War studies that emphasizes Vietnamese voices and experiences that has in the past been overlooked by the primarily American historiography of the conflict. When I then look at my source material, I can ask myself even more specialized questions that narrows it down at times to a singular individual: "Why did Phan Chot, whose daughter was murdered by American soldiers, join the Kit Carson Scouts and fight alongside them?" -- then it starts all over again. Phan Chot's story tells us a great deal about individual motivation -> why a South Vietnamese man who had once fought against Americans would defect and volunteer to wear an American uniform -> Why a person would change sides during war.
This layered depth is often overlooked by laymen when thinking about history. It might seem amusing that an individual might specialize in an extremely niche subject that seemingly holds no relevancy, but I would argue that these small puzzle pieces adds to the whole in order to complete a larger picture. This, however, is part of a larger debate (exemplified by The History Manifesto) that calls for longer-term narratives as opposed to the narrow and specialized subjects being studied in academia today.
To answer the more specific (and personal) questions you've posed, the Kit Carson Scouts were an interesting footnote that I wanted to explore as an undergraduate and that many years later I have published scholarly researched about. I have always been interested in the experiences of marginalized voices in historiography and they certainly fit the bill for me at a time when I needed to write my thesis and wanted something exciting to write about. Beyond my own work, only one published scholarly article has been written about this subject. So I guess we're two. As previously mentioned, I do not have to explain my field since it's pretty large to begin with. But yes, I have to explain who the Kit Carson Scouts are repeatedly -- even in conference papers and scholarly articles! I can practically write out the introduction in my sleep by now. My elevator pitch is usually that introduction: "I study the Kit Carson Scouts. The KCS were South and North Vietnamese men who defected from the PLAF and PAVN and volunteered to work for the United States."
The subsequent question, based on the idea of the PLAF as depicted in Hollywood movies and documentaries as hardcore fanatic nationalist fighters, is usually: "Why would they do that?"
That, my friend, is the same question I asked myself all those years ago.
I ended up studying the ways trans people (they called themselves transvestites) in the Weimar Republic thought of themselves by studying magazines and sexological texts. And for me it was personal, I’m trans and I had questions about my history, I found some cool sources that were under explored and it became my thesis! So it was a combo of neat sources and personal connection for me. (Ironically while being trans led me to my topic it’s also what ended up making academia not an option for me which might be a reason why it’s kind of under studied) While I was working in the field I was one of only maybe two or three people writing specifically about trans media in the Weimar Republic in English. It was exciting to be working with a document that is so chock full of interesting and complex history and knowing not much has been said about it. Reading the words written by queer people 100 years ago was awesome because generally everyone but trans people got to tell our stories and this was a direct connection. I wanted to center these marginalized voices and understand them in their terms. Which was often difficult, but worthwhile, emotional work. By looking at the one trans magazine from that era we have and working with it I was able to connect to my past and shine a light on voices who aren’t often heard. This was a sprawling response but I wanted to give my two cents on this even if I’m not an academic historian anymore.
When I first envisioned my master's thesis project, I wanted to work the topic of Uruguayan exiles in Mexico. My first research proposal was something along the lines of a comparative study between Uruguayan and Chilean political organizations in exile and the freedom of action and resources they were provided by the Mexican government.
When I started the program, the pandemic had been going on for a couple of months, so scholarships for research stays abroad were cancelled, which meant that the possibility of travel to consult archives located outside the country the program takes place went out the window pretty soon. The seminar which I was suggested into has a very defined theoretical framework with which they (and therefore we) work, and so the whole thing with comparing exile experiences didn't really fit, so I had to rework the original idea. The school's library also happened to have a collection of a particular magazine published by Uruguayan exiles while in Mexico, so in order to make my research project more feasible, after pushing and pulling, it ended up being an analysis of said magazine.
Even though I was disappointed I had to modify my project in a relatively radical manner, I could still enjoy doing the research and I think it does add to the niche field of publications by Latin American political exiles in the late 20th century.
What I'm getting at here is that sometimes ending up with a niche research topic can be due to external factors. Happy (or not so much) little accidents, as Bob Ross would say.
As an American that grew up in Europe, I was fascinated by modern European history, particularly Western Europe. Junior year of college I needed to stay in the area the school was in due to work and financial constraints preventing me from going home. Both of my roommates got paid summer research programs that had them staying at the school for the summer. I applied to the same program with the research topic being in a field of European history I really like. Ultimately, my project got turned down for a variety of reasons but one of the unstated reasons I believe it was turned down was that my topic was too mainstream for a college to pay some junior-level college student to do. So naturally I was bummed. However, my junior year is the year I really got into anime and one of the classes I took that year was Modern East Asian History. As such, I did a complete 180 and started diving into Japanese history, Meiji Restoration period to be more precise, which coincidently allows me to keep some level of European focus in there. After my bachelor’s level course, I’ve since had chances to travel to East Asia and have done my master’s and have expanded my area of interest to include the modernization efforts in China and Korea during the same time period.
As for how many people share my field, the answer is not many, at least in the West. One of my main arguments for studying East Asian history is to go to a Barnes and Noble or equivalent and see how many books there are on East Asia compared to Western history, the answer is not many. Of course location has a lot to do with interest but still. Meanwhile, during my master’s degree I truly say how few published historians there are in the field. Edward Drea is the go to person for the Imperial Japanese Army while Kenneth Swope and David Graff are just a handful of the names that came up during my time studying Chinese military history. Of course you can find plenty of historians for such topics in their respective countries but as a Westerner is is a relatively untapped field.
Disclaimer that I'm not a professional historian, but I can confess to quite a fair bit of expertise within the given period of early medieval China (that is, the Period of Division between Han and Tang), which is... rather underrepresented in the Anglophone historiography (but hey, still better than the suckers who have to do Five Dynasties/Ten Kingdoms studies!). I have a secondary interest in Mesoamerica, which has far more works in English, but I'm nowhere near as strong there. I know, I know, this is a rather weird combination of interests, and there's a serious answer and a not-so-serious answer why.
For the more serious reason, I originally was exposed to Chinese history, like a lot of folks, from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Shiny action heroes, glamorous master strategists, all that totally appealed to preteen me. But eventually I noticed directly that directly after the supposed "reunification of China" by the Jin Dynasty which ends the novel was directly superseded within only a few decades by the Uprising of the Five Barbarians, where somewhat in parallel to the Roman Migration Period, dozens of tribal groups across East Asia conquered their way into China.
Now, this kind of gets a bit more personal. I'm 3/4th Min Chinese, 1/4 Cantonese, citizenship wise both Taiwanese and American. I've spent about a third of my life in Taiwan and the rest of it in the States. I speak Mandarin far better than Hokkien (Min) and then English far better than Mandarin. I'm pedagogically American, culinarily mainlander, visually Min, and religiously some mess of Buddhism and Daoism and agnosticism and Baptist Protestantism I don't think I'll ever figure out. So when I learned about this utterly creole China, that was a mix of so many cultures and religions, it strongly appealed to me personally as a way to explore and relate to my heritage in a way that I never was able to with the (inaccurate) homogeneous China narratives that tend to permeate a large percentage of the rest of Chinese history. There's also the factor of my preference for the lesser-studied southern dynasties during the Period of Division, which is owed partly to them being culturally closer to me and partly due to them being politically closer to Taiwan's history.
For the non-serious reason, it's because my first real history book was the rather unfortunate choice of Guns, Germs, and Steel. The book inspired me to do a lot more research into the fields it mentioned too. So really, my entire experience in history since then has just been finding new ways that the book at large is wrong and the China section in particular is wrong!
Do you spend as much time explaining what your field is about to a layman as you do the subject itself? What is your 'elevator pitch' when someone asks you what you study?
Originally, I spent four years of undergrad studying the American Civil War. I loved it, I focused on the western theater and William Rosecrans was my absolute favorite. I was convinced that I was going to grad school to help rehabilitate his image.
Christmas break of my MA program, everything changed. My aunt gave me a book about a dog named Judy. Judy was the mascot for the British Royal Navy during World War II, and was held as a POW with her men. That Christmas, I also lost my heart dog to cancer. After winter break concluded, I realized that my passion had always been animals. Originally, I entered my undergrad intent on becoming a veterinary technician but I am not good at science; so I happily switched to history. I sat in my advisor’s office, and explained that I wanted to research animals in history and she told me to do some hunting, then get back to her within a week.
I remembered the book that my aunt gave me for Christmas, so I started looking to see if the United States used dogs in World War II in any capacity. I found Dogs for Defense Inc., and was immediately blown away by the fact that ordinary civilians donated their pet animals to military service. It’s been my research and love for five years now. :)
For me, the line of interest went from:
Taking a modern US history class in college (freshman year) and realizing that while I didn't mind history in high school, "real" history was way more interesting, powerful, and disturbing. Gone were the memorizing of different presidential policies; in was thinking about systemic and structural issues, and why you really needed to know them in order to understand our modern world as well. That hooked me on the subject in general.
From there, serendipitously I took a campus job working in a department for the history of science and technology, and job involved me reading quite a lot of journal articles on the subject, and attending talks by scholars. Like most people I didn't know the history of science and technology was even a field of history you could study, and I was really drawn into it because I find science and technology inherently interesting, I enjoy learning about technical topics even though I am not a technical person (I never actually wanted to do science, is what I mean), and a lot of it struck me as a way to interrogate fundamental philosophical questions about knowledge (epistemology) but in a tangible and non-abstract way (most academic philosophy has never held much interest to me because it is too abstract and unrooted; using history as a way to interrogate questions like "how do we make or know facts?" seems much more graspable in my mind). So I started taking more courses there and gradually shifted more and more of my attentions to places like the history of physics, biology, and technology.
Of the many topics in the history of science that I studied, I ended up spending quite a bit of time doing work on topics related to nuclear history (one of my advisors was an expert on German nuclear physicists). It wasn't the only thing I studied, but I did enjoy it from the beginning. There was always a mystique to the bomb for me, and the secrecy reinforced that and made the job of the historian all the more challenging — but also rewarding. Trying to piece together a historical narrative from the fragmented documents that the censors let out feels almost like detective work, and I always found that very stimulating. It is very exciting to feel like you have "discovered something new," and you can do that (in a limited definition of "new") with secret histories pretty regularly, because there are always reams of documents that people have not had access to or not paid attention to, some of which were only recently released by the powers that be.
For the first two years of grad school, all I really did was take classes, read books, and write research papers. Every class I took basically required a 20-30 page research paper on some original subject. Some of these turned out very well (and one turned into my first journal publication), some of these turned out very badly (we don't speak of those). When it came down to the time when I had to choose a dissertation topic, I sort of looked back on all of the papers I had written and thought, "what is the unifying theme about the papers I really enjoyed writing and did a good job on?" And the answer was very clear: they were all about nuclear weapons, and they were all about secrecy. So I went to my advisor and said, "what if I wrote the history of nuclear secrecy?" And he sort of said, "has anyone else done that?" And I said, "I don't think so..." And then he asked, "will there be enough sources?" And I said, "yeah, I think that will be the case..." And he said, "OK then!" And that was that. And so I have been doing that ever since (that was a little more than 15 years ago). It's not the only sub-topic in the history of science I am interested in (I read around the edges of lots of things), but it's where I have staked my territory and until I get bored of it, it's where I'll probably stay. So far I haven't gotten bored!
As for my experience in working with it — it may be niche but I am not sure how esoteric it is, for better or worse. It manages to continually make itself relevant. I enjoy doing the work, and I've lucked into a professorship at a place that appreciates me, so I can't complain.
The number of nuclear historians of science is not very large — on the order of 10 or 20 in the US, I suspect. There are, I believe, around 5,000 professional historians of science globally, but it is very much a niche form of history compared to many other fields (it is hard to measure because historians of science/technology also overlap with other fields — e.g., historians of medieval science are also medievalists).
The crusades in general aren't a very niche topic, although there are certainly very niche sub-topics in there - I study the legal system of the crusader states, which, as a crusader military historian once told me, "can be quite a bore!"
When I figured out I wanted to study history, I thought I was going to study Canadian history, local stuff for me. I was even accepted into grad school for that, and I would have had full funding, a teaching job, a thesis topic and an assigned advisor...but on a whim I also applied to another school to study medieval history, where I would have none of that stuff at first. But I had to go there...I guess I just felt the siren call of medieval history.
In hindsight I was always interested in medieval history. We learned about knights and kings and castles in elementary school, but the most interesting bit for me was three-field crop rotation. I liked to read dictionaries and encyclopedias for fun as a kid (who doesn't!) and I remember coming across an entry for the "Byzantine Empire" which was defined as the medieval continuation of the Roman Empire. "The WHAT??", I thought to myself. That sounded amazing.
In high school we had a "world history" class and that's where I first read about the crusades. They went all the way to Jerusalem...and they conquered it?? No way. I had to know everything about this. The book I read was simply called The Crusades by Antony Bridge, which is more of a popular history book than an academic one. Years later when I was in grad school I found a copy at a used book sale and I bought it just for the nostalgia. It's still on my shelves now.
While I was still thinking of being a Canadianist, I took all the medieval history classes I could in university, including ones about Byzantium, the crusades, and medieval England. I didn't think it was my passion, it was just for fun, but as I mentioned, it made me want to apply for medieval history in grad school even though that made financially less sense.
Some of my grad school friends knew exactly what they wanted to do even before they got there. I really had no idea. I just stumbled into my thesis topic accidentally, during a class about medieval violence. I was reading about depictions of violence in accounts of the crusades, and I realized there was a whole society and legal system in the crusader states, which had just never occurred to me before.
I also realized I had noticed something that no one had really written about before (roughly, that Muslim accounts of the crusades sometimes unexpectedly but correctly identify/understand crusader laws), so that became my class essay, then my very first conference presentation, then the core of my thesis, and finally my first published article.
While there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of crusade historians out there, there are probably only a dozen people studying crusader law. I've probably met all of them. I'm not sure how they got into this niche topic, but for me it definitely wasn't intentional, even though I can see how I got here, looking back at things now.
Someone once asked me why I study this, and I said I just think it's cool. It was during a job interview and I didn't get the job, so I imagine that's not the answer they were looking for, but it's the correct one. It is pretty neat.
My topic is definitely an emerging field. For my MA I studied so-called vaccine alternatives. Now, for my PhD I am studying the history of vaccine hesitancy since the 1970s in Canada. And to be clear, I started my graduate research on this in 2018! Before hating anti-vaxxers was cool.
How did I get into it? Its really hard to piece together, by the time I was in graduate school it seemed like the natural choice. Some things that played a part:
I love reading things I disagree with, it gets my blood boiling in a good way.
My parents would have preferred I became a medical doctor, studying vaccines is close enough right?
In 2015 I saw an expose on 'homeopathic vaccines' on CBC and thought ... WHY ARE THOSE BEING SOLD! HOW DO WE NOT REGULATE IT.
And so, my MA looked at the history of homeopathic 'vaccines' in Canada and went from there. Luckily (From a funding standpoint) my research is really hot right now).
Well I'm not a professional at all—I'm just a dork with too much time on his hands, and other than annoying my friends, AskHistorians is the only outlet I've used for whatever research/study I've done. But I'm flaired in conlangs, so I guess that counts for something, right?
Like my AH profile says, I got into conlangs in general through a convoluted story involving Glee, a purimspiel, and Avatar. I will not elaborate on that story for the sake of amusing mystery, but the point is, about 10 years ago (holy crap) I discovered the world of conlangs, and that was just a very fascinating thing to learn about. People can build languages? That's awesome. I became mildly obsessed, and tried to learn about the different kinds of languages and motivations behind them, constructing my own, and also made it a point to learn the languages I could, though I never really got good at any.
And, well, blah blah blah, stuff happens: I read books, I think thoughts, yadda yadda…… while a passion, it's also a passive interest: something I care about and know a decent amount, but not something all that actively important. But when a couple years ago I started getting more active on AskHistorians for other reasons, I realized I can spiel about conlang history here, and someone might actually be interested! Which actually prompted me to be a little more active in that study.
And over the course of all that, I've come to develop a real appreciation for these 'lunatic' language creators. Until, like, the 20th century, so many conlangers were working on these projects thinking they will have a profound impact on society, and they just… don't. And I think it's easy to laugh at how futile these projects were, and how crazy these people were for thinking building a language would change anything. These people thought they'd go down in history for the results of the work, but instead they are barely a footnote of a footnote (if they're lucky), and not because of the results, but by how obscure their particular tactic was.
But I think there's often an honorable tragedy in their demise, that's a lot more human and relatable than they're given credit for. Plenty of people want to have a significant impact on the world, and try earnestly to accomplish that, and it goes nowhere. I mean, I work broadly in the arts—I know how easy it is for people to sneer when someone sees a problem in the world and thinks the correct response to it is to make a play or a mural or something (especially when you don't have access to a large audience). I think a lot of people can understand the worry that the efforts in their life won't have the results that they hope, and that thinking helps put me into the shoes of these oft-ignored historical characters, and understand how for them, these languages were among the most important things in their lives, and at least give them some credit and recognition for the this thing they were so passionate about. Maybe not the legacy they wanted, but some sincere appreciation.
…And then I look at Esperanto, which tends to violate all the typical trends of conlangs by actually being relatively successful, recognized enough to be mocked in pop culture, subtly influence politics in pockets of the world, have hundreds of first- and sometimes even second-generation native speakers, and still be connecting people across the globe over a century after it was created. And unlike most other conlangs, governments took action regarding Esperanto: the League of Nations had considered promoting Esperanto study in member states, and more importantly, Esperanto speakers were persecuted and killed in Nazi Germany and the USSR. And, well, if people are being murdered by their governments, I think they ought to have their stories told, and we ought to understand this element that was so important to them.
--
As for how many people share the field… probably not many, at least not those writing in English. There are a lot of people who take up the craft, but studying the history is still pretty niche even within the hobby—you might get enthusiasts who know the basic outline, but not that much in-depth. The Language Creation Society doesn't have a large list of recommended books, and most of the contents deal with media languages from stuff like Star Trek and Tolkien (which isn't surprising, since those are the most popular kinds of conlangs these days). There's a small but notable amount of material in languages I can't speak and therefore haven't touched, and also plenty of material lying around in archives only occasionally getting unearthed. Esperanto history, naturally, is probably the other most written about, as Esperanto studies are in fact a thing, and at least some of those writers do in fact have a professional background in history or academia, such as Humphrey Tonkin. What I've found in searching for scholarly articles, meanwhile, is that I usually find stuff written by linguists and literature scholars, analyzing the languages or their communities and cultures, which is valuable but not exactly the same thing as being history works. (Shoutout to Brigid O'Keeffe, who's an historian of Russia and doesn't speak Esperanto, but has written a fair bit about the role of Esperantists in Imperial Russia.)
So, what's my experience like working in something so esoteric? Uhh, I read some books, I dig up articles, and I scour the internet for the hope of finding interesting primary sources that other people have definitely looked at. Occasionally I share what I've learned with the fine people of AskHistorians. Happy end.
My love of military history was ignited by my family background, as my father was a career military man and I would travel to all these historic posts which have their own flavor. He would take me to all the American Civil War Battlefields or whatever historical site was in the area. He would even have me write papers on 'Bunker Hill' or 'Why did we have the American Revolution?' -- which is an interesting way to spend your summer as a teen.
I eventually joined the military and served in some pretty badass military units. I would read about my Regiment's exploits in the trenches of WW1 or how they jumped into Normandy. At this point, I just wanted to fill my gaps of knowledge in and started heavily reading about military history. I just read everything I could till finished my time in the military. I used the GI Bill and went to the UK, studying Archaeology at a very well-known university.
During my undergraduate I found myself gravitating toward the middle east, as I had spent time there in the military and was fascinated by the culture and history. My department had many projects in the Gulf and I found myself specializing in Defensive Architecture with a heavy emphasis on Landscape Archaeology. I followed this up into my graduate years, becoming the expert in my little corner of the world -- which is very small, like small enough that if I mentioned where you could find me out pretty easily.
I ended up leaving the archaeology field and I am now working somewhere completely different -- though oddly, it does mix my time in the military and living in foreign cultures together. I still do heavy reading of the boring academic type, but it's more for personal enrichment than professional development.
I'm more of an amateur historian for Chinese Medical history, but I do work with the original texts in helping the translation and editing of them, as well as own a library of approximately 600 books.
For me, the sheer amount of Chinese medical literature it what astounds me, and just how much they wrote about certain topics. For example, the book Discussions on Cold Damage (Shanghan Lun 傷寒論), they estimate nearly 600 books were written about this single book by the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911. That is incredible, to think that one book could create so much scholarship around it.
Another example is Chapter 10 - Channel and Network-Vessels of the Lingshu from the Huangdi Neijing (黃帝内經 approx 0 CE)- this chapter inspired a whole book dedicated to it in the 14th century by a scholar-physician called Hua Shou, who set out to clarify the terminology used in this work - and after his work you see him constantly referenced when people are discussing this chapter, it's truly fascinating to see.
I also like to trace ideas in the field and see how authors arrange certain ideas, whether it be diseases, bencao (materia medica) or pulses and try and understand why did the arrange it that way, what are they telling us about them and their practice style. I also find it fascinating at the different texts and how authors have attempted to answer difficult questions in the medicine.
I have some colleagues who share my passion for the history, and we have lovely discussions and debates about topics, and it's incredibly refreshing to talk to people who understand the same depth of historical topics.
Uh, I don't know if I classify as a historian but I study the history of food. I like food. Some people share my field but they're mostly there to root out bad company habits like excessive sugar and salt in fast food beung the reason why homemade food is better.
I started serious historical study because I was volunteering with a museum that needed extra educational staff.
I fell in love with the late Colonial period of history because I found the history fascinating. I moved on to early American politics mostly to argue with folks who portray the founding fathers as a conservative monolith when reality is far more fascinating.
I also started studying the history references in Irish folk music because I was given an interpretation of these songs and their role in Irish history and I wanted to dig down to the roots and draw my own conclusions.
Generally, in every niche aspect of history I study, I wasn't happy with the singular interpretations that my peers held. I wanted to dig into primary source documentation to find my own interpretations and opinions.
Wow... the responses here are overwhelming, and they are still coming in. Thank you all for taking the time and effort to tell us about your topics. And not just about the topics themselves, but how to look at "history" and what an "historian" is.
I will take some time to fully comprehend your responses, but wanted to give a quick thank you now.
So far:
u/Bernardito/ u/danieliable/ u/Trooper-5745/ u/HistoryCat42/ u/RiceEatingSavage/ u/restricteddata/ u/AlchemicallySpeaking/ u/WelfOnTheShelf/ u/Dirty_Mike_N_Da_Boiz/ u/Crimson_Marksman/ u/GrandmaPoly/ u/ComplexComedian/
This is a great thread. Thanks.