AHA Announcements

Keep up with the latest AHA activity supporting history and historical thinking in all fields and professions.

AHA Guidelines Crucial to Response to Controversial Textbook

September 9, 2016 - AHA Teaching Division Councilor Trinidad Gonzales (South Texas Coll.) and AHA member Emilio Zamora (Univ. of Texas, Austin) are part of a committee that has released a report citing numerous factual inaccuracies and generally poor historical work in a textbook proposed to meet Texas’s Mexican American Studies standard in high schools. Drawing on the AHA’s Guidelines for the Preparation, Evaluation, and Selection of History Textbooks and the Association’s Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct to evaluate Mexican-American Heritage, the committee, convened by a member of the Texas State Board of Education, found a lack of “critical dialogue with current scholarship,” which resulted in “a polemic attempting to masquerade as a textbook.” The AHA remains unaware of any role played by professional historians in writing the text; apparently the publisher ruled out participation by scholars of Mexican descent because of concerns that they would be “biased” (quoting news reports). Here at 400 A St. SE we wonder how many of our colleagues born and raised in the United States have authored US history textbooks tainted by their “bias” as Americans.

The committee, convened by Ruben Cortez, the 2nd District representative to the Texas State Board of Education, released its report at a press conference on Tuesday, September 6. AHA members Gonzales and Zamora testified in front of the Texas State Board of Education on September 13. You can watch the hearing online.

AHA Tuning Project featured in The History Teacher

August 23, 2016 - The August issue of The History Teacher spotlights the AHA's Tuning the History Major project, an "incredible and ambitious endeavor" to articulate the knowledge and skills that students acquire when they study history. The issue features articles from a range of faculty voices, representing the diversity of perspectives that the AHA coalesced during the Tuning project. AHA K-12 members automatically receive a subscription to The History Teacher. All other members can subscribe or purchase individual issues at a discount. Learn more at MyAHA.

Toynbee Prize Foundation Awards Jurgen Osterhammel

August 8, 2016 - The Toynbee Prize Foundation has selected Jurgen Osterhammel as the recipient of the 2017 Toynbee Prize. The Prize, given every other year to a distinguished practitioner of global history, will be formally awarded at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Denver, Colorado, on January 6, 2017.

AHA Speaks Out Against Actions in Turkey

July 25, 2016 -  The AHA, as a member of Scholars at Risk, and also as a scholarly body concerned with and committed to protecting the working environment and rights of historians across the world, endorses in full the statement issued by Scholars at Risk calling for an ongoing dialogue about and the restoration of legal rights to academics in Turkey. The AHA has also joined more than 20 other scholarly societies and the American Council of Learned Societies in a letter expressing similar concerns and objections. These statements follow the AHA's letter to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the mistreatment of scholars (February 4, 2016). [Updated July 26, 2016]

AHA executive director, Jim Grossman, on Australian radio discussing history and memory

July 18, 2016 - During his trip to Melbourne to deliver the Bailyn Lecture at La Trobe University, Jim Grossman appeared on The Conversation with Jon Faine and Clare Wright on 774 ABC to discuss the legacy of war memorials.

House Appropriations Committee maintains Fulbright-Hays funding

July 14, 2016 - After advocacy efforts from the AHA and other humanities organizations protesting a 69% cut to Fulbright-Hays funding, the US House of Representatives voted to maintain level funding for these international education programs. Read more from the National Coalition for History.

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