A month ago, I was struck by a whim to make a survey for people who post about history on tumblr. I wrote it up and posted it without a lot of editing and without any second opinions, so some of the questions are badly phrased. More than 200 people took it anyway, and I’d like to give a big THANK YOU to everyone who did that, and everyone who reblogged it. You all are my heroes. Here are the results, question-by-question, with a little bit of commentary. (Again, you can find the raw results+some of the written responses here.)

How did you first become interested in history?

I was really excited for this question, because I’m interested in how interests are sparked, especially to this degree, where we have 200+ people that are researching and writing about a traditionally academic subject just because it’s fun. I wrote about how I became interested in history, and about fiction sparking interest in general, here. I loved seeing people mention books or games or TV shows that I’d also consumed that led me on my journey to where I am now.

I was also a little bit sad at how many people were embarrassed by their entry point. On one hand, I get it, because mine was Hetalia. It’s kind of embarrassing, objectively. But it’s okay. Thirty-four people were led here because of Hamilton, and that’s okay. You found something you loved. Just be aware of how you got here and the biases you might have because of that. (Everyone has them. Everyone should try to be aware of them.)

How did you find the tumblr history community, and what made you want to begin posting about history?

This wasn’t a very good question, honestly. I stopped keeping track of responses because they were all over the place. But you can look at some of them on the spreadsheet, in the Words tab at the bottom. For this question and the previous one, there were a lot of responses, so I basically chose at random which ones to include. I loved reading all of them, though.

A few people mentioned The History Peeps, and plenty said they didn’t feel like they were really part of a community. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and maybe you can help me out. I’d known about THP for some time, but by the time I started my history blog, things had pretty much died down, and that seems to be the case for lots of other people, too. It’s sad, and I’m sure being around for its “heyday” would have been great. But, community is what people make it. What would it take to revive or create a new history community on tumblr?

How much of your blog is about history?

One question that isn’t incredibly well-worded. As we’ll see later, while there are a good number of people that don’t post about history often, that doesn’t mean they aren’t reading about it/doing their own research.

What subject(s) were you most interested in when you first started getting involved with the tumblr history community, and what are you most interested in now?

Oh boy, this one was hard to keep track of. I did my best. The graphs contain the top answers, and the spreadsheet has a more complete list.

So, it didn’t change much. But I think people’s interests tended to get more diverse after they got to tumblr, so that’s neat.

Are you currently focused on the history of your own country or another country’s history?

Sometimes it strikes me as strange that non-Americans would care about American history. But then I remember that I like Russian history, and lots of Americans on tumblr are into French history, so I guess it makes sense. It was really interesting to see just where the division is, though.

Is English your first language?

This probably would have fit better in the demographics section, but hey. If you’re blogging about history in a language that isn’t your native one, you have my utmost respect.

What historical figure are you most interested in right now?

Hamilton won the popularity contest, which is unsurprising, but I will say that he pulled ahead at the end. For a while at the beginning it was a three-way tie between him, James Madison and Charles Sumner. Look at the spreadsheet for a complete list of every person anyone answered with (unless I missed someone). You guys have some very diverse favorite people. It’s also worth noting that 12 people answered that they weren’t really interested in people primarily.

((@the person who answered Ivan III, PLEASE MESSAGE ME he was my favorite person for years and I was so thrilled to see your response))

Have you ever thought about leaving the tumblr history community?

If yes, why?

More than a few of the people who answered “Yes” said that they were more considering leaving tumblr entirely, not the history community specifically. I’m gonna quote some that aren’t, though, and you can judge them however you want. There’s a more complete list on the spreadsheet. (Each paragraph break is a different response.)

They can be really annoying. It’s mostly the Hamilton discourse

Infighting and the usual fandom drama (sometimes at the intersection of the history fandom and the Hamilton fandom, but not always), the History Peeps dissolving and leaving behind a less close-knit community

being that my favorite era is the american revolution, blogs soon became bogged down with constant hamilton musical posts. ive always had my issues with the musical and overall it makes my interests in american revolution history and history in general taken less seriously, as if it was just a fad (i already had a difficult enough time getting taken seriously because of the fact that i am a lesbian black women in a straight white male dominated field). it left a bad taste in my mouth and because every american revolution blog that i followed all posted it, i decided to take my leave from the community. i dont post to my history blog anymore even though i do still follow a few history blogs.

The Hamilton Fandom

Bad Historiography, bad historiography everywhere

Historical revisionism, hostility based in bigotry, large Neo-Nazi presence in WWII topics

You are all SO young. Still getting Bachelor’s degrees, still 21 or younger. I sometimes feel like an old lady at the age of 26, seeking a job at a museum.

I kind of did for a while just because I didn’t really contribute with it because I was intimidated by others. I feel like the pure history people are generally welcoming and kind of like “let me tell you about this neat thing I learned,” but sometimes it can be a bit intimidating because people just know so much more or it can get hostile at points especially with more controversial figures.

Anti-Semitism

I know I sound pretentious but the Hamilton Musical Fandom has ruined a lot for me. They aren’t as passionate about the actual history or people and more just glorify them. It’s all black and white thinking and it really gets under my skin.

Which best describes you?

I was particularly interested in seeing how many people weren’t in school. I’m not, I have no desire to be any time soon, and sometimes it feels like I’m the only one.

Also, I hope we’re protecting our single middle schooler.

Are you majoring in history?

Another badly worded question. This is interesting to me for two reasons: more than 50% of people who answered are, plan to, or already have majored in history. Not all of these people will end up in the academic field, but some will, and some will be teachers. When considered in the light of the demographic info below, that’s a pretty cool thought.

And then there are also a good number of people who aren’t going into history at all. It’s a hobby to them, but they’re still doing research and interacting with it just because it’s fun. I love it.

If you’re working, does your job have anything to do with history?

@the 28 people who answered “Yes”: first, congratulations. Also, if your place is hiring….. I’m willing to do any kind of grunt work……….  😉

Do you ever seek out information about history unrelated to schoolwork and outside of tumblr?

Many more people are researching about history multiple times a week than are majoring or plan to major in history, which I love.

Where do you get most of your information? (check all that apply)

Someone pointed out that I didn’t include podcasts on this list, which was a huge oversight because I also learn a lot from history podcasts. My bad.

What websites do you usually go to for information?

I’m going to compile people’s answers to this into a separate post for reference. But, while I was thinking about that, and while looking at responses to other questions where people mentioned they didn’t know where to go for information, I thought about maybe making a whole reference blog. People could submit sources/books/podcasts/etc and I could sort them by subject matter. And people could possibly ask for advice and draw on the community for the best places to find the info they’re looking for. Thoughts?

Do you think your extracurricular studies have academic merit?

Do you feel that history as an academic field is inherently inaccessible to those not involved in academia?

One response I got to this was:

That question about history being accessible to those outside of academia? I know what you want. You ain’t slick bitch

Sorry? I actually don’t know what this means. Maybe the question was worded badly? Maybe there’s been a discussion about this already and I just missed it? I’m always open to discussing things further.

I do think it’s interesting how many people answered “No,” and then in the next question said that they did have a hard time finding information. When I wrote the question, the main things I was thinking about were: inability to access information, complex language being used to exclude people who haven’t been “educated”, and higher education or a lack thereof being used as a barrier from entry into the field (as well as the related issue of the cost of that higher education automatically barring a lot of people from even considering it). I’d be very interested in discussing with other people how they were interpreting it, and why they answered the way they did.

Do you have a hard time finding information? Have you ever had to give up on something you wanted to read because of a paywall, the information not being available online or in your geographic location, or a book being too expensive?

I’ve struggled with most if not all of these things. To the people who are having problems with the cost of books/age: my dad has worked in university libraries all my life, so I’ve been visiting them for a while. I’ve never had anyone ask to see proof that I was a student. If you have a university near you, it might be worth looking around. Even if you can’t check things out, nobody will stop you from spending a few hours there reading. And in my experience, the history shelves tend to be very quiet and very exciting. Also, look through the spreadsheet responses to this question and the next one for some great ideas, such as:

There’s ways around paywalls. I emailed sagejournals to get access to many of their articles and scholarly journal type things, and after no response, emailed one of the authors who gave me a login to access anything I wanted for free, and was able to get sources of immeasurable merit for my tutorial exam.

Also,

No BUT ONE OF HAMILTONS SON’S BLACKED OUT STUFF IN ALEX’S LETTERS SO NO HISTORIANS CAN READ IT AND IM STILL SALTY ABOUT THAT

same….

Anything else you’d like to add?

I did the first year of a History degree but gave up because I found writing essays difficult and did poorly though I knew the information. I would love to work in History but I feel that because you have to be good at essay writing and I was never sure if I was finding enough resources and things. I find it intimidating.

I wanna hug this person honestly. I like to write, but I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing for about a year now. Are there alternative ways into the field? I’m still trying to figure it out. But we can talk more, if you (or anyone else) would like to.

Re: the last question, I work in archiving and the current concern in the field is digitizing everything so more people have access. Nonacademic persons have access to a lot of things, but certainly not as much as academics, and even still there are documents that, for example, only have an existing copy somewhere outside of France despite being about the frev, so we’re working to fix that. Just wanted to share that in case a lot of people respond saying they have terrible with accessing resources. We are really trying our hardest to get it to them.

Everyone go high-five an archivist today. We would all be lost without them.

Regarding the accessibility question, I answered “maybe” because I don’t think it’s impossible to access the meat of the field if you don’t have a degree; Google and other digitization programs have made accessing a wide pool of primary sources like newspapers way easier to access than they have been in the past, and it’s usually not too difficult to get your hands on secondhand books off Amazon and other sites. That said, there’s a level of constructed [and I feel unnecessary] inscrutability surrounding academic publications in history; I’ve had to spend an hour or two to sit down and puzzle out exactly what argument was being made in more than a few academic articles I’ve read in the last year or so, and it often feels like the authors are being deliberately wordy and long-winded to make their arguments harder to hash out, which makes digesting their writing far harder than it needs to be and, I’d imagine, nearly impossible for anyone without some level of training in academia.

This is kind of what I was thinking about when I wrote that question. Thank you for your input!!

History can be studied both inside and outside an academic context, and relying purely on an academic perspective can restrict your understanding of the subject itself, because academia has traditionally only been accessible to a small and privileged group.

I’m gonna come back to this in the demographics section.

Queer people deserve better tbh

true

Demographics

What is your age?

Well, this definitely backs up what that old lady (*wink*) said. I think a good bit of that is probably just the nature of tumblr, though.

How would you describe your race?

I’m gonna comment on a lot of these questions all at once down below.

(The spreadsheet goes into more specifics for all of the demographics questions. Also, I know that Hispanic and Latinx aren’t the same thing, but one person described themself as both, so I just put them together.)

How would you describe your gender?

Since I didn’t ask whether anyone was trans, I don’t have numbers on that. Six people specified that they were, and I put that separately on the spreadsheet.

What is your sexuality (and romantic orientation, if applicable)?

Is this relevant?

Listen… Everything on this survey was put to a test of one question: am I interested in the answer? If I said yes, it went on the survey. It’s all just for fun.

I’ve often thought that there was a really high number of aces in the history community, so it was really cool to see actual numbers on it. High five, guys. And because I was curious, I also made a graph for the romantic orientations of the ace-spec people specifically.

Here’s my commentary:

A lot of people who took this survey are majoring in history or want to major in history. And in a lot of ways, that’s really exciting. There are so many people here that are underrepresented in academia. Women, nonbinary/trans people, and anyone who isn’t straight really haven’t had much of a voice historically, and there are so many views of history that can be explored by these groups that just haven’t been by straight men.

But we’re still incredibly, overwhelmingly white. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy history, and it doesn’t mean you don’t have something important to contribute. But it does mean that we, as a group, need to be careful. We need to listen. So many of us know what it’s like to have our concerns and our viewpoints ignored by academics. Don’t do the same thing to other people.

How would you describe your political beliefs?

I thought this would be a good question, but then I realized I don’t know anything about politics or political ideologies. So, I just made a graph of the words people used the most. You can see the full list on the spreadsheet.

How would you describe your religious beliefs?

Considering the person that said they were considering leaving the community/had already left the community because of antisemitism, that thing I said up there about race also applies. Don’t be antisemitic, guys.

I also sorted out the number of people that specified their Christian denominations on the spreadsheet. I’m alone in Seventh-Day Adventism (also I didn’t take the survey), but it might be interesting to some people!

Do you have a mental illness?

I’m sure this is also something that could potentially affect the historical analyses of the future, if future academics are more knowledgeable about mental illnesses than the average person. It would be a mistake to think that mental illness is a new phenomenon.

Are you autistic?

Are you disabled?

Do you have a learning disability?

Again, let’s be aware of where we are: don’t be rude about autism or any kind of disability. Listen to people.

What is your nationality?

Lots of Americans. It’s cool to see who else is here, though. And it’s very possible that there’s big communities of history people on tumblr that this survey didn’t reach because they’re blogging in other languages. Who knows!

What country do you live in now?

If living in the United States or Canada, what state/province/territory do you live in?

I was really excited for this one. There weren’t enough Canadians to make an entire graph for them, but you can see the numbers for that on the spreadsheet. There’s also a state-by-state list there. I didn’t make a map, but if someone wanted to do that, it would be really cool. I did want to see where we all were region-wise, though, so.

This does not follow the population rankings according to US census records. It’d be cool to look into reasons as to why that might be.

Also, when I was counting everything up by regions, the first list I used didn’t have Missouri on it, so for like five minutes I was convinced that Missouri was fake and didn’t exist.

Conclusion

This was a lot of fun. It took a lot of work to put everything together, but my curiosity is satisfied (for now). Thank you again to everyone who took the survey, and thanks also for looking through all this. It is Very Long, and I apologize for that. I have no condescending think-piece in store, but anyone is welcome to do what they want with this data (just let me know about it!). If you have any questions, or would like to discuss something further, or if I made a mistake somewhere, please don’t hesitate to let me know! You can find me on tumblr, or e-mail me at daisyemhall@gmail.com.

Now go reblog the post so that other people can see this. Thanks!