What Makes History Nobel Prize Worthy? Claudia Goldin and the Relevance of History of Education

In 2023, Claudia Goldin received the Nobel Prize for her groundbreaking research in economics. In this article, I use Goldin's research to reflect on the role of history of education in academic research. I argue that Goldin's remarkable achievement underscores the need for historians of education to reach a wider disciplinary audience in the humanities and social sciences. Goldin's success lies not in isolating her focus to a subfield, but in connecting historical research to wider concerns in the discipline of economics. Goldin's research thus reminds us of the skills required of historians of education: to understand the research interest and terminology of other research fields, and to use historical methods to address the key problems that those research fields explore. That is, we need to learn how to apply historical methods to what are essentially nonhistorical problems.