In this article, the authors discuss how the historians' job market is perennially rocky. The history profession had its "golden age" in the 1950s and early 1960s when a generation born in the demographic trench of the Depression entered the market just as the first of the baby boomers began to swell college enrollments. But that moment was fleeting, and baby boomers emerged from Ph.D. programs to a very different job market. Thousands of young scholars had to compete bitterly for fewer than 200 jobs at the American Historical Association's 1971 meeting. The job market swung back into alignment at a lower level in the 1980s, but then careened again into disorder in the 1990s. Due to the profession's uncertain future, the authors recommends that professors should help students and junior colleagues to understand the conditions in which they are now looking for work. Senior scholars should act as stewards of their departments and their disciplines. They should gather information about their fields, assess the impact of recent changes in the academic cycle on their junior colleagues, and remind administrators that they cannot achieve economy and flexibility in the present at the cost of future academic generations.