AHR History Lab

The History Lab launched in March 2022 as an experimental space driven by a single question: how can the AHR help reimagine the practice of history in the 21^st century?  The kinds of field-shaping interventions our authors make in the Lab involve collaborative projects designed to showcase transformative approaches to new methods and fields in history, to reinvigorate more familiar realms of historical study and to expand the public facing reach of our historical practices.  The forms that Lab projects take reflect the AHA’s recent Guidelines for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship and its concerns with demonstrating “a wide range of scholarly historical work can be undertaken in ways consistent with our disciplinary standards and values.”

All History Lab pieces undergo peer review and contributions to the Lab each receive a DOI to enhance searchability. They are also logged as research articles in our publisher Oxford University Press’s metadata.  With one of the highest impact factors for history journals in the world, the American Historical Review and the pathbreaking work that appears in the curated space of its Lab take innovative new historical scholarship to a growing audience in and out of the academy.

The History Lab also contains two subsections:

• The History Unclassified section, located within the History Lab, features essays that are creative, unconventional, genre-bending modes of historical writing.
• #AHRSyllabus is a collaborative project designed to help teachers and students look "under the hood" at how historians in the early 21st century do the work of history.