EXPOSED
The bulk of a historian's paid day is reading, summarizing, synthesizing secondary literature, drafting narrative text, and preparing exhibit copy, reports, or background briefs — exactly the work large language models already do at usable quality and enormous speed. What resists is physical archival work: locating and handling uncatalogued manuscripts, reading damaged or handwritten primary sources in context, authenticating provenance, and standing behind an interpretive claim under professional or legal scrutiny. There is no license, no signature requirement, and a tiny national headcount (about 3,450), so most employed historians work in government, consulting, museums, or historic preservation rather than pure scholarship — and those roles pay for defensible judgment, not prose volume.
Dipped in 2020, then grew past where it started.
Median pay $63,680 → $76,750 -3.6% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+2.2% 3,400 → 3,500 on the projections basis
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +2.2% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~300 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
HistorianResearcherGenealogistArt HistorianFilm HistorianOral HistorianProtohistorianDance HistorianHistoriographerMusic HistorianCounty HistorianHealth HistorianMedical HistorianResearch AssociateResearch HistorianHistorian DeveloperHistoric InterpreterMedication HistorianCollection SpecialistField Court ResearcherGenealogist ResearcherHistorical InterpreterArchitectural HistorianDramatic Arts Historian
Holding it up: judgment & accountability . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier An 8 reflects the split in an actual week: literature review, chronology-building, drafting Section 106 effects narratives, and writing exhibit label copy are already machine-drafted at usable quality, while paleography on an unindexed 18th-century deed book, cross-checking a courthouse fire gap against county tax rolls, and establishing provenance chains for a repatriation claim still require a person in the reading room — the resisting share is real but is the minority of billable hours.
Some physical or field component A 6 covers travel to archives, county recorders' offices, and field visits to survey a building for National Register eligibility — real time out of the chair, but in climate-controlled reading rooms and standing structures with gloves and a camera, not the uncontrolled conditions that push a score into the teens.
No licence, no signature requirement A 4 is the floor plus nothing: there is no state licence to practice history, and while Secretary of the Interior Professional Qualification Standards (36 CFR 61) gate who can author a Section 106 or NRHP determination, that is an employer/agency credential check on a CV, not a personal licence that can be revoked or sued.
Meaningful discretion A 10 sits at the top of real discretion without crossing into 14+: deciding that a fragmentary record supports a finding of adverse effect, or that a company plausibly knew about asbestos hazards by 1948, is a contestable call you defend in deposition or peer review — but the consequences land on an agency decision or a jury verdict, and the historian is one input among engineers, archaeologists, and counsel.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (8/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (4/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (8/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (10/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 22 of this occupation's 36 points (61%).
Embodiment (6/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
History Teachers, Postsecondary EXPOSED
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 57/100, still EXPOSED.
Genuine two-tier occupation: if the literature-review, exhibit-copy and background-brief tier is absorbed, what remains is uncatalogued and unscanned manuscript work, paleography on damaged hands, provenance authentication, and adversarial source criticism — the residual job is the judgment tier. Watchable signal: consulting and museum job postings shifting from 'research and write' to 'verify, authenticate, testify'.
Provenance and repatriation work under the revised NAGPRA regulations (effective January 2024, shifting deference to tribal traditional knowledge and tightening institutional deadlines) plus museum due-diligence on Nazi-era and colonial-era acquisitions makes a named historian the owner of consequential, contested, reversible-by-litigation calls.
Expert-witness historians in tobacco, asbestos, lead-paint, tribal water-rights and Indian Claims-type litigation are already subject to Daubert/FRE 702 and Rule 26 disclosure; the 2023 amendment to FRE 702 tightened the proponent's burden. A court rule or state bar practice requiring the testifying historian to certify primary-source review and disclose AI assistance would attach real sanction exposure to the opinion.
Section 106 / NHPA and NEPA review already require a qualified professional meeting the Secretary of the Interior's Professional Qualification Standards (36 CFR 61) to author and sign historic-property determinations and HABS/HAER documentation. If SHPOs or the ACHP add an explicit certification that the signing historian personally verified archival sources and did not rely on unverified generative output — analogous to the attorney AI-verification standing orders many federal judges adopted in 2023-24 — the signature becomes personally attributable rather than nominal.
Narrow but real: if archives, university presses or grant funders adopt disclosure-and-verification requirements for AI-assisted historical scholarship (the AHA has issued statements on generative AI in the discipline), a human-attested provenance chain becomes the purchased good for authentication and litigation clients. This does not extend to popular narrative history, where buyers show no demonstrated willingness to pay for human authorship.
Volume of undigitized material is the floor here — most local, county, corporate and foreign-language holdings remain unscanned and unindexed, so on-site handling, condition assessment and in-context reading of fragile originals cannot be remoted. This score rises only relatively, as digitizable work leaves the occupation.
The limit. Headcount of ~3,450 caps everything: too small to sustain a licensing board, and no state has ever proposed one. The realistic top is roughly the mid-50s, driven almost entirely by the federal-preservation signature and expert-witness channels — which describe maybe a third of employed historians. For historians whose work is synthesis and narrative writing, none of these levers reach them, and no plausible mechanism gives that work a trust premium.
Adjudication: scored twice independently and the runs disagreed. The change held under every rounding method, so the average was published.
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 410 | $115,690 +51% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 180 | $80,400 +5% |
| Salt Lake City-Murray, UT | 80 | $33,840 -56% |
| Urban Honolulu, HI | 70 | $95,470 +24% |
| Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY | 60 | $48,610 -37% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 60 | $61,640 -20% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 50 | $98,210 +28% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 50 | $88,790 +16% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 40 | $116,520 +52% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 410 | $115,690 +51% |
| San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX | 40 | $101,900 +33% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 36. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.