In the months before Contingent began publication, Bill, Marc, Emily, and I worked hard to explain the mission of the project, how we came to be involved in it, and what about it was important to us. We rooted our “Contingent stories” in the three principles at the heart of the project.
History is for everyone.
Every way of doing history is worthwhile.
Historians should be paid for their work.
Given that we were asking for the money and support of so many people, we felt it was important to explain why we believed the project needed to exist in the form we were proposing—and even why we believed it needed to exist at all. Now, after six months of publication, we want to look back on what we hoped Contingent would become, consider what it has become, and think about what it might become in the future.
My Contingent story considered the moment when a student realizes that history—both the subject matter and the discipline itself—might actually be for them, too.
For some, it’s because they hadn’t known that history could really be about people like them, or about the things that are interesting and important to them.
For others, it’s because they hadn’t known that people like them got to do history, or that the people who got to do history cared about the stories of people like them.
For many, it’s because they hadn’t previously encountered history as a process, as something that is done, as something they could do.
One of Contingent’s three founding principles is that history is for everyone, but that means more than publishing free, accessible, widely-read history articles. It means publishing history articles that are for all kinds of people with all kinds of interests. There’s no lack of history writing (and other forms of media) out there. Lots of it is free and accessible to a general audience. But it’s not about the history of women’s wrestling gear, or Parsi cookbooks, or prison gift shops.
For our magazine to make the argument that history is for everyone, our editorial choices had to be rooted in another of our principles: every way of doing history is worthwhile. If everything—and everyone—truly has a history, then it should be the goal of historians to ensure that everyone can see themselves and their interests reflected in our work. Even if some readers learned of the magazine because they were primarily interested in U.S. Civil War history or the history of gun rights, things that many mainstream magazines and publishers would publish, I hope they read something else while they visited and maybe even saw some of themselves in a bit of history they weren’t expecting.
I can say I’m pleased with the breadth of what Contingent has published so far, but there’s far more work to be done, and Contingent isn’t alone in doing it. It is still the case that certain pieces catch fire more quickly and more easily, and much of that comes down to what many people expect history to look like and who they think is supposed to be interested in history.
This conundrum connects to something Contingent has done better than I ever expected, and something I think it needs to do even more: show people how the sausage is made.
Much has been made of the public’s supposed hunger for history, especially in the wake of the 2016 election. I’m proud of the way that Contingent has been able to share well-researched, well-written, non-paywalled history with a non-academic audience. But simply sharing the products isn’t enough. It never has been. Given the long-term efforts to dismantle the system of full-time tenure-track college teaching, and the even longer-term cultivation of a broad disdain for the humanities, it is even more important that historians show their work.
Plenty of newspapers, magazines, universities, and professional organizations are interested in publishing and promoting good history. But none of them are particularly interested in showing what it means—and what it takes—to produce that good history, or even consider what we might mean when we say “good history.”
I used to tell students that really becoming a historian meant making that switch from being a fan of the team to being a fan of the game. It wasn’t enough to like the history of the English Civil War, or Andrew Jackson, or the 1960s. But how are you supposed to do that? Lots of teachers, from kindergarten through college, are doing this work in the classroom every day, but never as much as they’d like to, and never without critics breathing down their necks. Outside of school, most people don’t have the opportunity to learn what it means to do the work of history, if they even think of it as work in the first place. You can read a lot of good history in mainstream publications and still have no idea how the game is played.1
By publishing pieces about the past that mainstream outlets might reject as “too niche,” Contingent works to pull in new fans who may never have considered that their “niche” interest could be the object of historical inquiry.2 But the only way to cultivate support for history and historians more broadly is to turn those people into fans of the game itself.
To do this, Contingent has pulled back the curtain on the working conditions of those doing history every day—the emotional, the material, and the way those two can never really be separated. Major league athletes need unions, in part, because so many who consume what they produce see the production itself as play, not work. At Contingent, it’s not enough to talk about how the game is played or even who’s defining the rules of the game. We think it’s important to talk about how the game itself is work—work that’s difficult, work that takes expertise, work that deserves compensation.
We all hoped that everything Contingent published would advance the goal of showing readers what it means to do history, in abstract and concrete ways, but I couldn’t have imagined how wonderful that would look in reality. We hope that you’ve found Contingent‘s pieces interesting, useful, and even worthy of sharing with others. We’re beyond excited to show you where we’re going next.
- How are you supposed to know how historians gather and use evidence if that evidence isn’t cited? See also Karin Wulf, “Could footnotes be the key to winning the disinformation wars?” Washington Post, August 29, 2019.
- It is important to note that what counts as “niche” to some presses and magazines can be as broad as “women” and “people who aren’t white.”
