AHA in the News: 2024 Archive

  • AHA Executive Director Quoted in Huffington Post Article on Florida Law Requiring Schools to Teach “Evils of Communism” (April 2024)

    Apr 18, 2024 - 

    AHA executive director Jim Grossman was quoted in a Huffington Post article by Lydia O’Connor on a new Florida law that requires K–12 schools to teach what Governor Ron DeSantis calls “the truth about the evils of communism.” “If our goal is to help students learn about threats to freedom and democracy, why are we not also requiring that they learn about fascism?” Grossman said. “This legislation is largely symbolic, catering to popular notions of a continuing‘threat’ of communism in the United States. A good teacher can stay within the law and help students learn how communism has evolved internationally and nationally, including a variety of perspectives on how it has worked in practice in specific countries.”

  • AHA Executive Director Appears on SpeechMatters Podcast to Discuss Divisive Concepts (April 2024)

    Apr 02, 2024 - 

    AHA executive director Jim Grossman appeared on SpeechMatters, the official podcast of the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, to discuss “divisive concepts” legislation and how it creates “challenges for the teaching and learning of history that compromise democratic values and institutions.”

  • AHA Member Interviewed in IGN about Using Video Games to Teach History (March 2024)

    Mar 18, 2024 - 

    AHA member Tore Olsson (Univ. of Tennessee) was interviewed by Wesley Yin-Poole for IGN about his use of the video game Red Dead Redemption as a teaching tool in his American history classes. “[H]istorians, we use pop culture all the time. We use film and literature and TV series, but a lot of historians have been reluctant to engage video games for various reasons. And I decided, well, no, I want to take this medium seriously, because it’s so dominant,” Olsson said. “Video games are so powerful at instilling that curiosity and passion in people. The games themselves usually can’t provide the full story, but they can at least get people fascinated and interested in learning more about it.” Olsson also wrote about teaching with video games in the December 2023 issue of the American Historical Review.

  • TIME Publishes Article by AHA Researchers and Executive Director on K–12 Instruction and the ‘History Wars’

    Mar 14, 2024 - 

    AHA researchers Nicholas Kryczka, Whitney E. Barringer, and Scot McFarlane, along with executive director Jim Grossman, wrote an article for TIME discussing the findings of the research team’s Mapping the Landscape of Secondary US History Education project, a two-year initiative investigating how social studies is being taught in K–12 classrooms. “The typical American history classroom is neither awash in white supremacy nor awoke with critical race theory,” they wrote. “Politically motivated activists may be waging a history war, but teachers are not its warriors.”

  • AHA Annual Meeting Featured in Verge Article about AI in History (February 2024)

    Feb 21, 2024 - 

    The AHA’s recent annual meeting in San Francisco was featured in an article by Josh Dzieza for The Verge about the intersection of AI and history. “AI seemed to be everywhere at the 137th annual meeting of the American Historical Association last month,” the article states, sharing observations from attendees about discussions of AI in panels, history projects featuring machine learning, the use of AI in their own work, and how these types of programs could affect historical research.

  • Executive Director Quoted in Washington Times Article on Introductory US History Courses (February 2024)

    Feb 02, 2024 - 

    AHA executive director James Grossman was quoted in a Washington Times article by Sean Salai about a study of introductory US history syllabi by Arizona State University’s Center for American Institutions that found “‘identity-focused terms’ such as ‘White supremacy’ dominated their content.” “White supremacy is not an ‘identity-focused’ term,” Grossman said. “It is a term that describes a set of legal and social structures that framed the American South for decades. It was inscribed in the law and social practice.”

  • AHA Executive Director Featured in Washington Post Article on Trump’s Civil War Comments (January 2024)

    Jan 08, 2024 - 

    AHA executive director Jim Grossman was featured in a Washington Post article by Marianne LeVine about former president Trump’s assertion that the US Civil War “could have been negotiated.” “Across much of the southern portion of the United States people were owned, bought, and sold by other humans. . . . The declarations of secession explicitly state that the seceding states were leaving the Union to maintain that system, and because many northern states were refusing to return escapees from that regime,” Grossman said. “This could not be ‘negotiated.’”