“...In what way is ‘historian’ not a profession? ...”
I guess we’re going to have to proceed via baby steps here.
A profession is defined by exclusivity: the in-group is delineated from the out-group. There are criteria for qualification and entry; for maintaining standards; gatekeepers exist, and sanctions can be taken members who violate standards (both of competence and ethical probity).
The traditional “big three” are theology, the law, and medicine. Academics languished long as provisionally-respectable stepchildren, both helped and held back by the mundane fact that the first two were bound up with voluminous book-learning.
Others were added as the scientific revolution gathered momentum: engineering (civil initially, then mechanical, then electrical), administration, management, academia; military professionalism got its start in the United States via civil engineering (West Point, officially founded in 1802, was the nation’s very first engineering school), but paucity of content remained a factor until the proliferation of technological weaponry began to accelerate later in the 19th century.
Forum members will note that “historian” and “scientist” appear nowhere on any of these lists (fans of Star Trek and Dr Who notwithstanding). Historians are at most academics, and science was the province of wealthy eccentrics or underbusy clergy until the rise of government bureaucracies and university-led research institutions in the late 19th century.
Historians are usually writers, and there are no entry criteria for that activity. Of a certainty, authors never face discipline. Essentially, writers are people who can’t shut up ... the fact that they can multiply words means more to them than the validity of anything they might chance to write.
“A profession is defined by exclusivity: the in-group is delineated from the out-group. There are criteria for qualification and entry; for maintaining standards; gatekeepers exist, and sanctions can be taken members who violate standards (both of competence and ethical probity).”
All of which exist for historians.
“The traditional “big three” are theology, the law, and medicine. Academics languished long as provisionally-respectable stepchildren, both helped and held back by the mundane fact that the first two were bound up with voluminous book-learning.”
Nonsense. You should start by reading up on the seven liberal arts.
They were: Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithematic, geometry, astronomy and Music.
This goes all the way back to the Greeks.
They are matched by what Aquinas called the seven sciences.
Civil law, Canon law, History, Natural Philosophy, Normative Philosophy, Theology and Metaethics.
This is very different from the programme today, but it demonstrates that history as a discipline is one of the oldest disciplines in existence.
“Forum members will note that “historian” and “scientist” “
You can fold up all of engineering and science into Natural Philosophy, respectively, if one studies the discipline even in the time of Galileo. It wasn’t until later that the disciplines began to divide where one might study Biology, and not Physics or Chemistry. This divide is actually quite late - late 19th century.
“Historians are usually writers, and there are no entry criteria for that activity.”
Quite the contrary. The study of rhetoric, logic and oratory are all part of the trivium and go back all the way to Ancient Greece. Whereas you may not value the ability to write and write well, it is very much a discipline.
“Historians are at most academics, and science was the province of wealthy eccentrics or underbusy clergy until the rise of government bureaucracies and university-led research institutions in the late 19th century.”
I suggest you look up the word empiricism and get back to me. Empirical history is possible, and it has many proponents, probably the greatest of them Ludwig von Ranke, who argued for the systematization of History and historical studies.
Again, please look it up yourself before commenting on historiography and the development of history through the ages. History as a discipline goes back to Herodotus, prior to Aristotle and natural philosophy.