Thanks for coming, thanks for your contributions, and special thanks to Darrell and the AHA staff for organizing this and putting up with at least my repeated inability to hold a deadline during a pandemic.
My frame for thinking about this has been Lara Putnam’s article from 2016 about the “Transnational and the Text Searchable” which made a really interesting argument about the unacknowledged ways that full text search, if it didn’t cause the boom in transnational history in the 1990s and 2000s, at least made it much easier for it to take a particular form while leaving historians with an abbreviated investment in the countries, periods, and people they study.
Out of a train-wreck curiosity about what’s been happening to the historical profession, I’ve been watching the numbers on tenure-track hiring as posted on H-Net, one of the major venues for listing history jobs.
[Update 10-2: switching to US and Canada only. An earlier version of this included other countries, even though I said it didn’t.]
We’re now into October. Usually–I know now–this is the period by which half the tenure-track jobs for any cycle have been listed.