AASLH has released Understanding the Public History Workforce, a major new study examining who works in history organizations and how they experience their jobs. Read on its own, it offers important insights into burnout, compensation, inclusion, and professional climate. But its full significance becomes clearer when placed alongside two earlier field-wide studies: the National Museum Salary Survey (AAM, 2017) and the National Census of History Organizations (AASLH, 2022).
Together, these three efforts give us something rare in the cultural sector: a layered dataset. The Census tells us the size and structure of the history organization field. The Salary Survey establishes a compensation range for the museum field as a whole. The new Workforce Report adds the human experience dimension in history organizations. They don’t align perfectly, but sufficiently to make some findings and recommendations for history museums, historical societies, preservation organizations, and historic sites.
Start With Scale and Structure
The 2022 Census identified 21,588 history organizations in the United States —more than all other museum types combined. History organizations are ubiquitous, present in nearly every community. The Census also emphasizes the field’s distinctive “hybrid” character: it’s often a partnership between government agencies and nonprofit organizations.
This structure matters. A field composed largely of small, community-based institutions operating within hybrid public–nonprofit governance systems will behave differently than corporate sectors or centralized public systems. Authority is diffuse. Revenue is mixed (appropriations, philanthropy, earned income). Asset accumulation is limited. Management is complex.
The structure shapes the results.
Compensation Patterns Are Not New
The 2017 Salary Survey documented persistent wage compression across job categories in museums of all types. Most employees hold advanced degrees, yet salaries remain modest relative to national norms for comparable education levels (e.g., medicine, law, engineering). Only a minority feel they are paid fairly—an environment similar to teaching, social work, and nonprofits in general. The new Workforce Report confirms that this pattern continues in history organizations. This is not a sudden downturn. It is durable constraint.
When we align the 2017 salary baseline with the 2026 workforce climate data, we see cumulative strain rather than isolated dissatisfaction.
The Hidden Forces Affecting the Work Force
I often apply Michael Porter’s Five Forces to analyze a museum’s strategy and if we adopt it for history organizations as a whole, the findings become even more legible.
- High fragmentation. More than 21,000 organizations, many small, often overlapping in mission.
- Limited pricing power. Visitors and donors have many alternatives; the costs of switching to another museum, historic site, or historical society are low.
- Strong substitutes. Digital media, tourism, entertainment, and informal heritage experiences compete for attention.
- Low barriers to entry. Communities can form new historical societies or house museums with modest funds.
In such an environment, the financial pressure is structural. Wage stagnation is predictable. Burnout emerges not simply from poor management but from the field’s economics. This does not mean the field is “failing.” It means the field is operating within a constrained competitive structure.
Culture and Structure Are Colliding
The Workforce Report highlights a powerful tension: practitioners report deep meaning and purpose alongside worry and frustration. That emotional duality mirrors patterns in other mission-driven fields like teaching and healthcare.
But in history organizations, this emotional climate sits atop small-institution economics and hybrid governance complexity. Diffuse accountability and limited scale make structural reform difficult.
So What Now?
Three implications stand out:
1. Workforce sustainability is fundamental to field-wide success. With more than 21,000 history organizations nationwide, workforce conditions are not isolated HR issues; they are field-wide infrastructure concerns. Burnout, perceived inequity, and weak accountability structures do not merely affect morale—they constrain institutional capacity. Culture is not a soft variable; it is infrastructure.
2. Governance must confront economic reality. Compensation patterns are not temporary anomalies. They are embedded in the sector’s structure. Boards and funders often concentrate on programming, fundraising, and audience growth while giving limited attention to internal labor systems. Yet workforce conditions are directly tied to resilience, risk management, succession planning, and mission delivery. Ignoring the economics of labor does not make them disappear; it shifts their cost onto staff.
3. The field must decide whether to redesign or endure. A Porter-style analysis suggests three structural moves: differentiate, consolidate, or change the rules.
- Differentiate: Reduce substitutability. Competing on “we preserve history” is not strategy. History organizations must focus a distinctive value or benefit to the community that increases relevance and reduces easy substitutions.
- Consolidate: Reduce fragmentation. Shared services, regional networks, mergers, pooled endowments, and coordinated specialization can strengthen foundations and reduce duplication.
- Change the rules: Rethink credentials and standards, reimagine the 9-to-5 office traditions, advocate for dedicated funding mechanisms (such as local heritage districts), and reposition history organizations as contributors to civic education or economic development.
The new Workforce Report should not be read as a crisis narrative. Nor should it be treated as an isolated morale issue. Placed alongside the Census and Salary Survey, it reveals a structurally constrained but mission-rich sector.
The question for leaders, trustees, educators, and funders is not whether the data are surprising. The question is whether we are willing to redesign the structural conditions under which history organizations operate—or whether we will continue asking dedicated professionals to carry structural strain indefinitely.
The future of the field depends less on passion—of which there is plenty—and more on strategy.
Engaging Places 
A concise analysis, Max. For consolidation, that thought has been around for my whole career. People have noticed “overlapping” missions and “too many mouths at the trough.” I think it’s time to stop that talk and embrace the 21000+ for what they are. Rather than overlapping, these museums present a layered look at history. Sure a state historical society may cover a town in the state as the town’s history is part of the state’s. The same argument demolished the network of regional history organizations in the 1970s. By the 1990s such regionalism was novel. I think we need to apply James Moore’s model of business ecosystems because it aligns with early 1900s history leaders’ vision. Thwaites, Buck, Blegen, Robinson, Shambaugh, Kellogg, and so on. We can use the power of history to guide the future.
Secondly, for economics, the literature I feel is clear that history is simply not a primary attraction. The primary is the reason anyone goes. History, however, is like the Best Supporting Actor in a movie—not the reason you went but the reason the movie worked and the reason you might go back. People who go to farmer’s markets in a historic district are likely to go back because they had an authentic time, but they went for fresh food. They didn’t go for the history, but they come back because of it. The more we can do to be an attraction’s second banana, the more successful we will be.
There’s probably other lessons in there, but these two stand out.
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Thanks, David. I always appreciate your perspective on these topics. I wonder what others are thinking? Are these challenges best resolved on our own or as a field?
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To quote John Crippen, “It’s both/and.” I’ve long believed in federalism. Individual experimentation and the field as a whole so long as the field doesn’t go off the rails. There’s always the risk of narrow thinking, but that happens on both levels. So does innovation. On either level, the trick is to avoid the path of least resistance or eating low hanging fruit. All of us need to listen to proposals from all comers and learn instead of using whatever occurs as “common sense” like an American Schwärmer.
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