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News

The latest activity of the AHA and historians in supporting history and historical thinking.

  • AHA Issues Statement Concerning Access to French Archives (November 2020)

    Nov 25, 2020 - 

    In solidarity with the French Association of Archivists, the AHA issued a statement urging reconsideration of a policy change by the Secrétariat général de la défense et de la sécurité nationale that that renders “some well-known sources, and many others yet to be analyzed, practically inaccessible, even to professional researchers.” The AHA stressed that “reading and interpreting these sources will be critical to the production of new historical scholarship in the future,” and noted that “Article L. 213-2 of the Code du patrimoine states that, after 50 years, almost all archival documents pertaining to the French state enter the public domain and should be made available without any conditions.” The AHA previously wrote to the French government about this issue in February 2020.

  • AHA Member Wins Harriet Tubman Prize (November 2020)

    Nov 25, 2020 - 

    Congratulations to Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (Univ. of California, Berkeley), whose book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South was recently awarded the 2020 Harriet Tubman Prize from the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The award is given to the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic world.

  • AHA Urges Reconsideration of History Program Closure at Guilford College (November 2020)

    Nov 19, 2020 - 

    The AHA recently sent a letter to the president and trustees of Guilford College, noting with alarm “the dramatic restructuring of academic units and program prioritization announced by Guilford College on November 6, 2020, including the elimination of the history program.” The college plans to terminate one tenure-track and two tenured history faculty members “without adhering to its own contractual Faculty Handbook, not to mention generally accepted ethical guidelines.” The AHA urged administrators to reconsider these changes, which are “likely to have serious and deleterious consequences for the practice of historical work and hence the quality of undergraduate education at Guilford College.”

  • AHA Expresses Concern over Legislative Request to Monitor Teaching of 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory (November 2020)

    Nov 19, 2020 - 

    The AHA sent a letter to the Arkansas Division of Higher Education (ADHE) expressing “grave concern about a legislative request that has been circulated to academic units in the Arkansas university system.” The request sought to collect “data on the teaching of ‘The 1619 Project’ and ‘Critical Race Theory’ at public higher education institutions in Arkansas.” “Neither the legislature nor the ADHE,” writes the AHA, “should be monitoring what qualified scholars are assigning to their students, except as part of a bona fide review and assessment.” 

  • AHA Member Appointed to Library of Congress Task Force (November 2020)

    Nov 18, 2020 - 

    AHA member Katherine Rye Jewell (Fitchburg State Univ.) was recently appointed co-chair of the College and Community Radio Caucus of the Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force. The task force’s mission includes supporting researchers and activists who preserve radio history, developing an online archive of radio collections, and protecting and preserving endangered collections. 

  • AHA Sends Letter Opposing Cuts in NHPRC Funding (November 2020)

    Nov 17, 2020 - 

    The AHA sent a letter to the US Senate Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government requesting that the subcommittee “reconsider its vote to eliminate funding for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.” The AHA noted that “the NHPRC provides millions of Americans with ready digital access to materials essential to civic education and an understanding of the documentary basis of American history” and urged a funding level that will “enable the agency to sustain its work on behalf of the nation's history and heritage.”

  • AHA Member Publishes New Book (November 2020)

    Nov 17, 2020 - 

    AHA member Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard Univ.) recently published a new book, Slavery in the Age of Memory, with Bloomsbury Publishing. “Exploring notions of history, collective memory, cultural memory, public memory, official memory, and public history,” the book “explains how ordinary citizens, social groups, governments and institutions engage with the past of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade.”

  • American Historical Review Article Wins NACBS Award (November 2020)

    Nov 17, 2020 - 

    Ellen Boucher’s American Historical Review article “Anticipating Armageddon: Nuclear Risk and the Neoliberal Sensibility in Thatcher’s Britain,” published in the October 2019 issue, won the North American Conference on British Studies’ 2020 Walter D. Love Prize for the best article by a North American scholar in the field of British history.

  • AHA Executive Director and Teaching Division Vice President Encourage a “GI Bill” for Essential Workers (November 2020)

    Nov 16, 2020 - 

    On Veterans Day, in an article in the Washington Post’s Made By History section, AHA executive director Jim Grossman and AHA Teaching Division vice president Laura McEnaney (Whittier Coll.) encouraged lawmakers to support the equivalent of a “GI Bill” for front-line COVID-19 workers. “To express national gratitude,” they wrote, “requires rewarding national service as part of the social contract in exchange for sacrifice.”

  • AHA Executive Director Writes Editorial in The Hill (November 2020)

    Nov 10, 2020 - 

    AHA executive director Jim Grossman recently wrote an editorial in The Hill discussing the November 2 executive order, “On Establishing the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission.” Grossman argues that the order “rests on caricatures of history education and remarkable ignorance about how historical knowledge evolves and finds its way into classrooms.”

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