The AHA annual meeting includes a set of late-breaking sessions, submitted shortly before the meeting, to allow historians to respond to current events or recent controversies within the discipline. Encompassing a wide range of perspectives, these panels show the relevance of history and historical thinking to public culture and policy.
Add late-breaking sessions to your meeting agenda via our Late-Breaking Sessions schedule track in the annual meeting app.
The Palestine Exception: War, Protest, and Free Speech
Friday, January 3, 2025: 1:30–3:00 p.m.
Sutton North (New York Hilton, Second Floor)
This roundtable will consider how the North American public and North American universities responded to the upsurge in Palestinian activism in the last academic year, while also considering the sources of that activism and the debates over its nature and its impact. The goal is to analyze the development and outcomes of the North American protests, including the multiple attacks on protestor’s speech—by university administrations, congress, and other policymakers.
Cuba’s Crisis in Historical Perspective
Saturday, January 4, 2025: 8:30–10:00 a.m.
Gibson Room (New York Hilton, Second Floor)
This late-breaking panel brings together historians of Cuba who have long experience working in Cuba and who are concerned for the people and the historical resources now at risk there and the future of historical research on the island. The catastrophic failures of the infrastructure compounded by the horrific effects of ever-worsening hurricanes and earthquakes that have rocked the island in the last months will be difficult to overcome, even if the Cuban and US governments could overcome past hostilities to address these.
Saturday, January 4, 2025: 10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m.
Riverside Suite (Sheraton New York, Third Floor)
Revoking the nation’s highest military award to US soldiers raises vexatious questions for historians and citizens, including Native Americans, who ever since disproportionately served in the armed forces. How should shifting public opinion about past conflicts, and Americans’ changing historical memory of them, affect the status of military honors awarded in a very different past, and its many contexts? What role should historians and their expertise have in official and public policy discussions regarding how the US military recognizes soldiers’ heroism, in past and present?
What Is History in the Age of AI? A Conversation about Historical Research and the Archives
Sunday, January 5, 2025: 10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m.
Chelsea Room (Sheraton New York, Lower Level)
Given these rapid developments, how might artificial intelligence change records management, archival research, and the future of historical scholarship and education? A recent History Lab in AHR 128, no. 3, explored AI, prompting R. Darrell Meadows and Joshua Sternfeld to offer a challenge to professionals: “To ponder the effects of artificial intelligence on the field of history quite often requires interrogating fundamental concepts such as truth, evidence, and authenticity.” This panel seeks to contribute to the conversations started in the AHR’s “Artificial Intelligence and the Practice of History” and address new developments since its publication.