But let’s be honest: most graduate programs in history are preparing students to be history professors. We can talk all we want about alt-ac careers, but when it comes down to it, few of them actually require a PhD, and almost none of them need you to have learned as much as I’ve learned about the day-to-day operations of rural 19th century parishes
True, one of the huge shortcomings of our grad programs is that they approach our training as PhDs in terms of professional programs like law school (i.e. you are trained for a very specific job). But I think you can give yourself more credit about the fact that your training was only partly about gaining knowledge/content. You aren't just a receptacle of specialized knowledge: a lot of this knowledge you produced yourself through really useful skills. You are an expert researcher, you can manage and synthesize lots of info on a variety of topics, analyze it and come up with impactful insights, create engaging narratives, and analyze a lot of different contemporary cultural problems using your skills and specialized knowledge (after all, it may be cliche but the past is essential to understanding and addressing the present). Positioning yourself as a kind of repository of knowledge/content belies the fact that you actively produced that knowledge and are capable of producing knowledge on a lot of other topics in a variety of contexts (and a hell of a lot quicker than people not trained to do this!).