History is for everyone. Every way of doing history is worthwhile. Historians should be paid for their work. These are the founding principles of Contingent, a nonprofit magazine for everyone interested in the past.
Why “contingent”? Two reasons: (1) the work of history can never be finished because everything is contingent upon an interconnected web of causes, impossible to ever fully disentangle; (2) a growing percentage of professional historians are contingent workers, employed on a freelance or non-permanent basis.
History is for everyone
Historians have lots of stories to share, but many traditional academic outlets aren’t accessible to the public, and lots of popular newspapers and magazines won’t publish these stories at all. Contingent is a place for those stories and those historians.
Every way of doing history is worthwhile
We publish a wide variety of topics (not just Trumpocentric hot takes) and genres (from personal essays to book reviews to comics). Popular outlets often take a narrow view of who is interested in history and what kinds of history are interesting. But from our perspective, if it happened, it’s history, and we’re interested.
Historians should be paid for their work
The majority of our writers and contributors are historians who don’t have tenure-track university jobs: the adjuncts, the museum workers, the high-school teachers, the park rangers. These are the folks who don’t typically get a byline in the New York Times or a talking-head gig at CNN—or heck, even a permanent job. They’ve put a lot of time, labor, and money into their research, and as much as we want to help them share it with the public, we don’t think they should be asked to do it for free.
We are an independent non-profit, not backed by any university or think tank, so we depend on your support. Help us do this right.
