Here's my idea for the future of historians. In this decade, as a powerful, stumbling United States proclaims yet again our "loss of innocence," historians should be as important as physicists were in the 1950s.

When I mentioned this idea to several historians at the convention of the American Historical Association in San Francisco over the weekend, they just stared. Most historians are modest, precise people used to being on the sidelines of history.

As Arturo Rosales of Arizona State University said, "My son works for Hewlett-Packard, and when I asked him if he could tell me what he was doing, he said, 'No, dad, you wouldn't understand. You're a historian.' "

Historians don't expect to be called upon to talk to presidents and Congress about the history of Islam or periods in America when civil liberties were revoked.

"Congress sometimes will call a historian to testify, but it's always a big name, an Arthur Schlesinger or a David McCullough, and never a specialist," said Bruce Craig of the National Coalition for History, which lobbies for historians in Washington -- a lobbying group of one, namely Craig.

Historians make the papers when there is a scandal. This weekend Stephen Ambrose admitted lifting a few passages from another author's book. A month ago the New York Times raked Michael Bellesiles for possibly inventing historical records for his award-winning book "Arming America," which claimed that few early Americans owned guns.

Local angle: Bellesiles said he used probate data from the 1850s in San Francisco as part of his evidence, but when historians tried to check it out, they learned all such data were destroyed when the old City Hall burned after the 1906 earthquake.

At the AHA convention, historians gossiped over wine and cheese about the predicaments of Bellesiles and Ambrose -- the latter suffers some resentment because he has become a one-man industry.

The success of books by Ambrose, McCullough and a few others belies the old argument that Americans are ahistorical, an argument supported by the fact that every time something awful happens, such as Pearl Harbor, Vietnam or Sept.

11, the phrase "loss of innocence" arises.

You have to ignore a lot of blood, chains and greenbacks to believe we're the permanent virgins of the world.

Our latest loss of virginity has been so traumatic, though, that we seem willing to see beyond our myths and our shores. Bookstores are full of books on Islam, terrorism and Afghanistan, books you never would have seen displayed on front tables four months ago.

An academic convention presents an outsider with the choice of a lot of small rooms and talks on strange-sounding subjects. I chose a tiny conference room at the St. Francis with a sign outside saying " 'Hill Rats' Open Forum."

That was where I met Craig, the historians' lone lobbyist. Craig discussed the status of the release of Ronald Reagan's papers, declassification of documents in the wake of Sept. 11 and federal expenditures on the study of history, notably the $100 million history-education bill pushed by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.

Byrd is "the patron saint of history," as Craig put it, an erudite, self- educated senator who hates the phrase "social studies."

There was just a handful of historians in the room, yet they presented tough issues facing their field, and I don't mean the occasional plagiarism you read about in the papers. I mean issues concerning things you may never read, or your children may never learn.

Michael Devine, director of the Truman Library, said he has grant money to pay the admission fees for children visiting their new, interactive exhibits, but schools are in such bad shape they can't pay for buses. "What good can we do if the schools can't get kids to us?" Devine said.

Ann Newhall runs the little-known National Historical Publications and Records Commission, which provides grants to nonfederal agencies to preserve historical records. "Our mandate is to preserve records, whether they were made with a quill pen or a computer," she said.

Currently, she is funding a major project to learn how to protect electronic records, "so if President Bush drafts a speech on a laptop, we'll have all drafts of it."

Lots of luck. The electronic age presents us with an archival nightmare. Unfortunately, Newhall's agency is budgeted with the Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Defense.

We may be entering an even darker age for history if we lose our historically significant electrons. We're so quick to hit the delete button. And what homeland are we defending, if we don't know its history?