Historian Anne Sarah Rubin

What qualities do you need to be a historian?

Curiosity is number one—you need to want to know what the past was like and to find all sorts of aspects of the past interesting. Beyond that you need to love to read, and be willing to write, and rewrite, even if you don't love the process. I think that historians also need to be tenacious. It takes a long time to do good research, which is often tedious. And good writing also takes a lot of time. You just need to keep plugging away at a project.