What is the difference between a professional historian and an amateur?

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What are the criteria of professionality in history and which are fundamental?

First thing you need to look for is the bibliography and endnotes/footnotes. Archival research is a must for professional historians when they are writing their dissertation, which eventually becomes their first manuscript/book. As well, they have to discuss and incorporate theory and methodology. Later in their careers they can, if they so choose, write books mainly based on secondary literature. Such books can do one of two things; they can challenge an accepted narrative/paradigm or simply create a general history for those interested in a specific subject. Most authors who write about history but have not been educated at the graduate level in history will not have a good grasp of theory and methodology and will, unfortunately, add little to nothing to our understanding of specific historical events/ideas/people/etc. that they choose to write about.

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This is actually a very good question, but it is important to distinguish between the term "Professional Historian" and the question of professional standards in history.

As others have already pointed out, a Professional Historian is simply one who is paid for working as an historian. The term does not, of itself, imply anything about the standard of that person's work.

Professional standards, on the other hand, are all about the quality of the work carried out by historians, whether they are working as paid professionals or unpaid amateurs.

To illustrate the point, David Irving has written a number of books and articles as a paid professional historian. However, his reputation as a reputable historian was discredited when he was shown to have deliberately misrepresented historical evidence in order to promote Holocaust denial. This was a gross breach of professional standards.

A number of organisations have published guidance on professional standards for historians, and I suspect that this might be what you were looking for when you asked about

"criteria of professionality in history".

In general, research that meets these standards is considered to be of professional quality, regardless of whether that research was carried out by a paid professional historian or an unpaid amateur historian.

To quote a few examples, there are published standards available online from:

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I consider myself an amateur historian. I have published a breadth and scope of answers on this site that a professional historian might well envy. For all that, I lack a few attributes to be "professional."

Some people might define a professional historian as someone who has a PhD and a list of publications. I have a BA in History (and Economics), one published work in "economic history," and an unpublished World War II manuscript.

The latter work (entitled "Axis Overstretch,") illustrates why I am an amateur rather than a professional. In early 2003, I submitted it to Williamson Murray, my favorite college professor, who reviewed it and offered an opinion that it had "a number of insights not generally found elsewhere." That was the good part. The bad news was that my bibliography was lacking in breadth and depth. He offered to cure this by sending me a reading list and then reviewing the revised product. Sadly, the Persian Gulf War intervened, and the Defense Department had greater need of his services than I did, so the book was never "finished."

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