News just out that the number of academic job openings in history has collapsed over the last few years, as there are fewer and fewer students interested in majoring in the subject. The data from the H-Net jobs database look like this for all history fields, and U.S. history
Those are the trend lines of shrinking departments.
Why has this happened? Maybe there is a clue to be found in the fact that biographies of major American figures are extremely popular with the reading public. Biographies especially of presidents and figures from the American Founding, but also generals and major business leaders, have not only rocketed to the top of the best-seller lists, but even spawned Broadway musicals.
But very few of them are written by academic historians. Instead, they tend to be written by journalists or professional non-academic writers like Ron Chernow (Washington, Hamilton, Grant, and J.P. Morgan), James Grant (Bernard Baruch), Doris Kearns Goodwin (FDR and Lincoln), or David McCulloch (John Adams, Harry Truman).
There are a few current exceptions such as Yale’s David Blight, author of recent biography of Frederick Douglass, or Beverly Gage, author of a recent biography of J. Edgar Hoover (with Ronald Reagan next on her project board) but these tend to be exceptions that prove the rule. The few academic historians like Blight and Gage who have written popular biographies tend to older, and withdrawn from the mainstream of academic history (or out of the academic world entirely), like Douglas Brinkley, H.W. Brands, Andrew Roberts, and Joseph Ellis. This is likely related to the fact that undergraduate majors in history have been dropping through the floorover the last 20 years.