CANTELON: History Associates is involved in a number of different applications of history. Our first business was, and is, research and writing, primarily books and studies for government agencies and private corporations and law firms—what I would term the traditional kinds of history, though our clientele may not be traditional. We do academic histories and celebratory histories. More recently we have been creating historically oriented websites for a number of clients.
A second branch of the business is archives, or information resources management. We are heavily involved in the development of electronic records archives as well as records audits. We do a good deal of traditional processing of paper records and objects, such as memorabilia, again for corporate clients and government agencies. This division has sales of more than one and a half million dollars a year.
Another major division handles litigation issues requiring an historical perspective. Federal and state environmental laws require that industries pay, or help pay, for environmental damages arising from past actions. For example, utilities may own sites that held gas manufacturing plants in the nineteenth century. Often these are located in industrial areas where there have been numerous subsequent owners who also may have contributed to the pollution. We search the records to see who was doing what, and when, and who other potentially responsible parties might be. We are experts in finding government contracts relating to World War II and the Cold War, when the government was far more interested in production than in environmental concerns. The cleanup could cost a government contractor hundreds of millions of dollars unless it can find the original contract containing a hold-harmless provision that gets the contractor off the hook. History Associates is known as the best company for locating those lost contracts. The 911 for environmental history, if you will.
We recently formed a division that does museum work. It started out with an exhibit we did for the International Spy Museum. That led to photo research and text writing for the Visitors Center at the American Cemetery in Normandy, France, and for the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. We do the picture research. We do the textual research. We do work for the Civil War Preservation Trust, helping to create interpretive text and design visitor trails for various battlefields.
That’s taken from an interview, Historian for Hire: A conversation with Phil Cantelon (with NEH chairman, Bruce Cole) in the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of Humanities magazine. Here is another quote:
COLE: Is it the case that in doing applied history you need skills that are not taught in the academy?
CANTELON: That’s correct. History Associates has a training program for all our young people. We’ll train them on research. We train them on how to do a budget, how to track a budget. We, in effect, give them a little entrepreneurial training. How do you sell your history? Why is it important to you? Why is it important to your clients? Why do people want it? We also try to teach them to think about taking some risks. I don’t think I took many risks as I went through college and graduate school, because everything was planned out in advance. My parents, who were not college graduates, did not fully understand what I was doing. They wondered if I’d ever leave school and get a job. They grasped what I was doing when I got paid for the first article I ever published, American Heritage in 1967. I got the outrageous amount of $600. But the reaction from one of my mentors, who later became a well-known New Deal historian, was, ‘You don’t want to be published in there. It doesn’t have any footnotes.’ But my parents understood, and then I experienced a different kind of response when a twelve-year-old kid came up to me and said, I read that article. It was really fun.
Read the whole thing. This is not a joke. [ link ]
History, bought, packaged and sold. Don’t you love it?
-Julie
