Statements, Standards, and Guidelines of the Discipline

• Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct (updated 2023)

  Whatever the venue in which they work, professional historians share certain core values that guide their activities and inform their judgments as they seek to enrich our collective understanding of the past.

• Guidelines for First-Round Interviews (2023)

  In an effort to better serve members of the AHA, and to promote the highest standards of professional conduct in the hiring process, we provide these guidelines for search committees and job candidates.

• Guidelines for Academic Job Offers in History (2023)

  The American Association of University Professors has drawn up a clear set of principles for offers of academic employment. These guidelines are designed to bring practices within the discipline of history into accordance with those principles.

• Guidelines for Advising the Doctoral Dissertation Process (2023)

  The guidelines aim to help both doctoral candidates and those who advise them to fulfil their respective obligations in ways that facilitate the work of students and allow them to graduate in a timely manner, while also respecting the many other duties and responsibilities carried by faculty.

• Guidelines for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship (2023)

  These guidelines lay the foundation for a broad expansion of what constitutes historical scholarship.

• Guidelines for Online Teaching (2022)

  Recommendations from the Ad Hoc Committee on Online Teaching.

• Statement on Right to Engage in Collective Bargaining (2022)

  The AHA endorses the right of all historians to organize and join unions or other collective bargaining units and engage in collective bargaining if they choose to do so.

• Guidelines for Acknowledgment of Collaborators (2021)

  The AHA affirms the importance of fully and publicly recognizing and crediting the work of all contributors to scholarly work.

• Statement on Research Access (2020)

  Access to research materials—both print and digital—is crucial for any historian engaged in scholarship and teaching. For historians working outside of well-resourced colleges and universities, gaining access to these materials has become increasingly difficult, particularly with the increasing breadth and depth of commercial databases often accessible only to scholars affiliated with a well-resourced university.

• Improving the Status of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty: Recommendations for History Departments (2020)

  These recommendations offer a menu of possibilities that department chairs might draw upon in consultation with individual Non-Tenure-Track Faculty, to integrate all faculty into the intellectual and teaching communities of the department, and to ensure that the principles and protections of academic freedom apply to all faculty regardless of rank or tenure status.

• AHA Resolution Supporting Scholars off the Higher Education Tenure Track (2019)

  In December 2019, the AHA adopted a resolution in support of scholars off the higher education tenure track and expressed its commitment to support, encourage, and engage the thousands of history scholars currently working off the higher education tenure track in a variety of settings.

• Guide for Dealing with Online Harassment (2019)

  Historians have the right to expect that discussion of their work as historians will be conducted in a civil manner, without the harassment and intimidation that mars much of public life in a digital age.

• Criteria for Standards in History/Social Studies/Social Sciences (updated 2019)

  State departments of education periodically review and revise curriculum frameworks and standards for teaching and learning in history and related fields. In recent years, the American Historical Association has reviewed a number of efforts, contributing in several cases to some useful revisions and also confirming the quality of several completed standards documents.

• Guidelines for the Incorporation of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the Work of the History Profession (2019)

  The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in History represents a major contribution to the mission of the American Historical Association (AHA) and the discipline and profession of History. Historians in this field present scholarly arguments about historical pedagogy, situate their work in the context of a larger literature on the topic, and rely upon evidence to support their claims.

• Guidelines for Historians for the Professional Evaluation of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2019)

  These guidelines describe what a SoTL research agenda could look like for a working history teacher and scholar and how departments can evaluate and reward that research.

• Guidelines for the Preparation, Evaluation, and Selection of History Textbooks (2018)

  Good texts must share certain general qualities, which broadly speaking apply to materials from grade school to college. It is vital to utilize these general criteria, along with other selection preferences, in evaluating the range of texts available at any level.

• Statement on Dual Enrollment/Concurrent Enrollment (2018)

  The AHA encourages universities and colleges to strive to improve history education in which professors and teachers share resources and ideas, and that academic history departments have greater oversight of curriculum and instruction of DE/CE.

• Statement on Employing International Faculty (2018)

  The American Historical Association is part of a global community of historians and history departments in the United States that benefit from international faculty. The AHA recommends that employers of historians be attentive to specific conditions that pertain to hiring our international colleagues, including visa requirements and logistics.

• Statement Supporting Skills-Based Employment for International Students (2018)

  The AHA strongly supports the right of international history students to pursue skills-based employment in the U.S. and encourages university administrators to make such opportunities known.

• Best Practices on Spousal/Partner Hiring (updated 2017)

  History department chairs throughout the country regularly encounter spousal/partner issues in hiring and retention cases. What follows are recommended as best practices are intended to help obviate some of the risks potentially associated with such appointments.

• Standards for Museum Exhibits Dealing with Historical Subjects (updated 2017)

  Museum exhibits play an important role in the transmission of historical knowledge. In aiming to achieve exhibit goals, historians, museum curators, administrators, and members of museum boards should approach their task mindful of their public trust.

• Statement on Age Discrimination (updated 2017)

  No one should be denied the opportunity to pursue a career in history because of his or her age.

• Statement on Diversity and Affirmative Action (updated 2017)

  The AHA is committed to diversity in the historical profession and recognizes the need for institutions to recruit aggressively and hire members from groups that have been historically discriminated against.

• Statement on Excellent Classroom Teaching of History (updated 2017)

  The Teaching Division and the Council of the American Historical Association endorse the criteria presented in the following statement as an appropriate basis for evaluating the efforts of institutions at all levels of instruction to establish the prerequisite conditions for historians to provide excellent instruction.

• Guidelines for the Preparation of Teachers of History (2016)

  The study of history is at the heart of liberal learning and lives at the foundation of education in a democracy. Attracting, preparing, retaining, and continuing to develop well-educated and effective teachers of history at all levels is of critical interest to the American Historical Association and the historical profession that it represents.

• Best Practices for Accessible Publishing (2016)

  The American Historical Association urges that published material be accessible to all scholars, including those with print-reading disabilities. To achieve this goal, it is imperative that publishers make materials available in accessible formats at the same time as print copies.

• Statement of Support for Academic Freedom (2016)

  Academic freedom of expression is essential to historical inquiry.

• Guidelines on the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians (2015)

  The context of historical scholarship is changing rapidly and profoundly. Disciplines and universities that emerged two centuries ago in a profusion of print now find themselves confronted with new digital forms. The historical discipline needs to address, directly and frankly, its particular disciplinary position at this historical juncture.

• Statement on Graduate School Offers of Financial Support (2014)

  Students are under no obligation to respond to offers of admission and financial support prior to April 15.

• Statement on Policies Regarding the Option to Embargo Completed History PhD Dissertations (2013)

  The American Historical Association strongly encourages graduate programs and university libraries to adopt a policy that allows the embargoing of completed history PhD dissertations in digital form for as many as six years.

• Statement on Productivity (updated 2023)

  The following statement seeks to contribute to the national debate over means of assessing the work of college and university faculty.

• Statement on Scholarly Journal Publishing (2012)

  The current system of access to journal content certainly contains elements of unfairness, in addition to adding burdens to budgets of institutions already coping with diminishing resources. But solutions that ignore the wide differences between the respective landscapes of science and humanities journals generate new, and more difficult, dilemmas.

• When Academic Departments Merge: First Principles, Best Practices

• Best Practices on Transparency in Graduate Student Placement Records (2023)

• Equity for Minority Historians in the Academic History Workplace: A Guide to Best Practices (2007)

  These standards are intended to guide the decisions and inform the practices of deans, department chairs, and senior administrators in universities and colleges and to serve as a resource for all historians, regardless of their rank.

• Statement on Peer Review for Historical Research (2005)

  Projects endorsed by peer review panels composed of competent, qualified, and unbiased reviewers that reflect a balance of perspectives should not be denied funding because of political, religious, or other biases of political appointees in the funding agencies.

• Statement on Oral History and Institutional Review Boards (2004)

  We reaffirm our support of the assertion that "oral history interviewing activities, in general, are not designed to contribute to generalizable knowledge and, therefore, do not involve research as defined by Department of Health and Human Services regulations at 45 CFR 46.102(d) and do not need to be reviewed by an institutional review board."

• Benchmarks for Professional Development in the Teaching of History as a Discipline (2002)

  This document suggests that collaboratives for professional development in history teaching need to be planned and viewed from several vantage points.