I think that if your intention is to study occultism and mythology, you should major in economics, focusing especially on monetary policy. (Just kidding!)

In truth, many colleges and universities have established departments of religious studies, as opposed to theology or divinity studies. Generally speaking, in the somewhat vaguely defined academic field of religious studies, historians, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists take religion, religious beliefs, practices, and believers as their objects of study. This is a different sort of academic undertaking than, say, studying religion in preparation for a ministry.

It is also common for colleges and universities to have individual courses on religion in other departments, such as philosophy, literature, classics, history, anthropology, or folklore.

Most academic study of American religious history has focused on the main streams of belief and practice. Because you bring up the issue of getting a job, I will say that this means that academics who might be capable of demonstrating expertise only in what might be regarded as the byways of religion—the occult and all that implies—have found themselves with fewer opportunities to land teaching positions. Developing a broad academic expertise, therefore, in the history of American religion would be a strategy that would maximize a young Ph.D.’s chances of landing a teaching position, no matter what he or she had specialized in.

However, as you might guess, now that the children of the 1960s and 1970s have become the academic old guard, as it were, scholars of American religious history have turned more attention not only to the history in America of the belief and practice of systems that have been explicitly “on the margins,” that is, occultist, but also to the way in which even mainstream religious groups have been influenced by the “alternative spiritualities” that have germinated and taken root here. This would include the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Masons, for example, as well as communal utopians, Swedenborgians, Spiritualists, Theosophists, Christian Scientists, proponents of the “New Thought” movement, and such 20th-century groups as Scientologists and those loosely linked under the name of the “New Age” movement. An example of a recent academic look at American religious history in this vein is Catherine L. Albanese’s 2007 book, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion.

Calling the media the "4th branch of government" is a rhetorical device, not a serious statement of fact. The point is to emphasize that the press is not a mere passive reporter of the facts, but a powerful actor in the political realm.

Calling it "the 4th branch" not only emphasizes the amount of power it wields, but is often meant to suggest that that power is not under the control of the people in the same way that their elected representatives are. The implication is that it acts as a shadow government, unaccountable to the people, but is instead beholden to special interests of one sort or another, or that the press's supposed separation from the government is largely an illusion. The corollary is that the press sometimes menaces rather than protects, or controls rather than serves, the public.

The "4th branch of government" is a phrase that appears to have first surfaced among critics of FDR's New Deal in the 1930s. It referred not to the press, but to the collection of new Federal regulatory agencies with top officials appointed by the Executive Branch. Their function was quasi-judicial, and they were not directly accountable to the people.

Identifying the "4th branch of government" as the press came a decade or so later. Hartford Courant editor Herbert Brucker, in his 1949 book, Freedom of Information, devoted some ink to it. He explicitly equated "the 4th Estate" (another, older phrase often applied to the press, which has its own linguistic history derived from British and French politics) with "the 4th branch of government."

Journalist Douglass Cater entitled his 1959 book on the practical relationship between the government and the press, The Fourth Branch of Government. Both authors were convinced that, insofar as the press did act as a true political player (rather than an unbiased observer of politics), it corrupted itself and went astray from its primary responsibility—to convey important information and to act as a nonpartisan watchdog for the public against all trespassers on their rights.

Lately, some political writers have used the phrase, "the 4th branch of government," to mean the voters' power to form law directly through petition or referendum, as in California.

The 1st Amendment of the Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom ... of the press.” The Constitution establishes a government with three branches, but it does not establish a press or a media. What it does do is prohibit the government from trying to control what people say, either in the press (and by extension in other forms of media) or outside the press.

The core principle is that in the U.S., as distinct from many other countries, the media (and the people in general) are not established or granted rights or status at the discretion or pleasure of the government. Rather, the government's power is entirely derived from the "just consent of the governed." The point of the 1st Amendment is to make sure that the government does not overreach itself by trying to limit the basic rights of the people, such as their right to speak freely, including their right to criticize the government. The government does not grant that right. It already exists, no matter what the government might say or do.

The 1st Amendment states the consequence of that fact: Congress cannot limit freedom of speech. The Constitution recognizes the press's freedom as fundamental and prevents the government from infringing on it.

Another way of demonstrating this: The government, barring a few exceptional situations, has not put itself in the business of funding the press, much less actually running a news organization (rather than a public information office). One exception is the grant money that partially funds the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio (and fully funds international broadcasting entities such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia).

Another exception is Voice of America, the government agency that broadcasts radio and television abroad. VOA is prohibited by the Smith-Mundt Act, however, from disseminating its programming directly to the American people. This was partly out of fear that an administration would find it a useful tool for selling itself to its own constituents and thereby unfairly consolidating its own power against its political opposition.

Incorporating the press into the government would make the media more accountable in some sense for what it says and does, and would make it less dependent on large commercial interests for success. It would likely make the media more careful and guarded about what it said. No matter what your political perspective, it is not difficult to think of instances where that would have been a good thing.

Politicians and journalists have recently talked about giving government subsidies to news organizations suffering from a dwindling subscriber base and shrinking audience or advertising revenues. This idea they justify under the notion that the press or the media is a kind of public service or utility and is valuable to the general welfare of the country. This would be an of extension of the idea of the electromagnetic broadcast spectrum as a public resource that is allocated and protected by the Federal Communications Commission.

Trying to bring the press under the umbrella of the government, even as a separate "branch," would join the interests of the press with the interests of the government that funded it, making it less likely to criticize the government. The press, then, as a government entity, would be perceived (and truly function) as a propaganda ministry, a partisan political tool.

This would jeopardize the press's credibility as objective, making it less valuable to the public. It would also introduce a largely unpredictable period of experimentation, resetting the most fundamental structure of the government by adding a 4th branch. It would also re-frame the relationship of the government to the people, from one in which the government is granted its limited power by the people (who always maintain their rights), to one in which the government is the granter and administrator of rights, such as, here, freedom of speech.

There are many countries in the world where this is the model. Many of them have media that are largely or even exclusively government-run (or at least government-funded). Despite the occasional desire of politicians or government bureaucracies to control a media that annoys or criticizes, the Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press have largely prevented such action here.

By law, the press is limited in its content when such content would be libelous, obscene, seditious (leading to "imminent lawless action"), or would threaten national security or the public safety. Restrictions on "hate speech" also limit the freedom of the media, as do copyright laws. It has been along the border of these limitations that skirmishes between the press and the government have been fought for nearly the entire history of the U.S.

Such skirmishes began in earnest with the passage of the Sedition Act of 1798, which, for a time, made it an offense "To write, print, utter or publish, or cause it to be done, or assist in it, any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the government of the United States, or either House of Congress, or the President, with intent to defame, or bring either into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against either the hatred of the people of the United States, or to stir up sedition, or to excite unlawful combinations against the government, or to resist it, or to aid or encourage hostile designs of foreign nations."

Nevertheless, it is a sign of how little support the Constitution gave to the government to define for itself the content of what the press could publish that 1st Amendment cases involving questions of the freedom of the press were decided in what historian Lucas Powe calls a "haphazard" fashion until the 1964 Supreme Court decision of The New York Times v. Sullivan, which clarified what constituted libel and what did not.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) makes available the census records from the decennial censuses (the latest to be opened for public inspection is the 1930 census). But administrative records of the Census Bureau are also kept at NARA. Generally, these are in Record Group 29. NARA's website contains a description of the items, including, for example, item 134, "Record of Enumerators, 1900," which is in 37 volumes. These volumes give the name and address of each enumerator (commonly called a "census taker") and agent, his or her daily rate of pay, and the number of his or her enumeration district and his or her supervisor's district.

In the 19th century, compensation rates for enumerators generally were set by the laws that authorized each specific census. Carroll D. Wright and William C. Hunt reprinted these laws in The History and Growth of the United States Census, published in 1900. This volume includes the pay rates for enumerators--and other staff--for each census from 1790 through 1890.

In it, we learn, for example, that the authorization law for the 1790 census specifies that the "marshals' assistants" (the enumerators) were to receive $1 for every 150 persons enumerated in rural areas and $1 for every 300 persons in cities, with some discretion allowed for marshals to supplement the pay of the enumerators working in rural areas, depending on the difficulties they encountered in locating people.

The amount and kind of information collected grew with each census. As a result, the basis on which enumerators were compensated reflected their increased labor. For the 1850 census, for example, enumerators were paid 2 cents per person enumerated (living or deceased), with a 2% supplement for collecting "social statistics," 10 cents per mile traveled, 10 cents per farm enumerated (where crop and livestock production figures had to be collected), and 15 cents per "establishment of productive industry."

The pay schedule for the 1880 census (the first in which women could serve as enumerators) was similar, except for replacing the provision for travel compensation with a provision enabling the Superintendent of the Census to adapt the rate of compensation to various regions, depending on the difficulties (mostly geographical) in collecting information there. A ceiling of $4 per day was set for enumerators in districts east of the 100th meridian and $6 per day west of that (enumerators were expected to work a 10-hour day).

Also included in Carroll's book are detailed listings of all the information that enumerators were expected to collect, as well as the printed instructions given to the marshals and their assistants, some of which are concerned with making exceptions to the standard pay rate for enumerators.

Enumerators have sometimes had to press claims for payment for "extra schedule work," such as, in 1880, arranging and copying long lists of occupants in alphabetical order or for required attendance at the local courthouse where they filed their forms.

For the last (2000) census, the Federal Register listed enumerators' wages as ranging from $8.25 to $18.50 per hour, depending on the locality. Typically, in recent censuses, regional supervisors have been given budgets and then decided how to recruit and pay the enumerators they have needed. Pay for mileage or travel has been more realistically set on a local basis, rather than a national one.

Census enumerators have often been motivated by other considerations than the mere pay--the feeling of patriotism, for example, or civic duty, or a taste for adventure, or even sheer curiosity. The people being enumerated have not always welcomed the questions of their government enumerators. In addition, the enumerator's job can be physically and emotionally demanding. For the 1890 census, for example, the regional agent in North Alaska tried to recruit men as enumerators and found that the wages he could offer them ($16 a day) were "absurdly low in the gold region." Most people he asked "simply laughed at him."

He then "appealed to the men's friendship, to their love of adventure, and to their love of country," and finally convinced 14 men to undertake the arduous task, which required traveling long stretches by dogsled and canoe and some wild encounters with some very wild men. The government paid them--in addition to their wages--50 cents a day per dog in their teams in order to feed them, and each enumerator also took along an Indian interpreter, who was paid $5 a day by the government.

The historian must also note that census-takers have sometimes been accused of being caught up in the "enthusiasm" of politics and the desire to maximize the local count, resulting in rumors of under-the-table remuneration. As an example, the U.S. marshal overseeing the 1870 census in the upper midwest lived in St. Louis, whose citizens, apparently, thought of the census as an opportunity for St. Louis to compete with Chicago. The census results showed a larger population in St. Louis than in Chicago, by a small amount, and the "citizens of St. Louis in grateful appreciation of the figures gave the marshal a banquet and presented him with a service of silver, as a reward for his victory over Chicago." The citizens of Chicago, however, were not at all amused.