About Special Issues
Published in December 2024, Histories of Resilience marked the AHR’s inaugural special issue. It features eighteen scholars from a wide range of fields contributing their research on resilience. Future special issues are listed below.
Forthcoming Special Issues
- December 2024: Histories of Resilience
- June 2026: ‘76 Objects
- 2027: Methods for Archival Silence in Early History
About the Methods for Archival Silence in Early History Special Issue
What should historians do when our sources do not tell us what we want to know? Although this may be a universal experience of historical research, the problem arises in various forms. Some silences are intentional, others unintentional. Some sources are minimal, others extensive but off-topic. Some sources are inaccessible, some have not been preserved, some were never created. Sometimes we do not or cannot know whether our desired sources ever existed, or, if they did, what happened to them. Silences cluster around certain topics, places, and periods more than others.
Historians have articulated this problem in a variety of ways. This call uses the language of archival silence and silencing developed by Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Marisa Fuentes. It could have drawn on the concept of the subaltern (Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak), strategically produced silence and plausible stories (Natalie Zemon Davis), records designed for jettison (Marina Rustow), hidden transcripts (James Scott), living oral traditions (Bethwell A. Ogot), or writing off the radar (James Lockhart), to name only a few.
Faced with archival silence, historians have developed a range of methods for working in, through, and around it. Some techniques and approaches have become characteristic of expertise in early periods. Others are applied by historians across specializations. These include but are not limited to reading against the grain; creative combination of well-known sources; creative use of unusual or little-known sources; oral and other forms of non-written record; technical skills in the so-called ancillary disciplines (numismatics, paleography, codicology, epigraphy, and more); interdisciplinary approaches to method (anthropology, archaeology, literature, linguistics, and more) and to what constitutes a source (climate data, aDNA, physical objects, art, and more); critical fabulation or disciplined imagination; and reframing our questions to build on our sources’ strengths.
We anticipate publication of the special issue in 2027.
About the 76' Objects Special Issue
“No Stamp Act” teapots manufactured in Britain for the American market. Beads. Smoothbore flintlock muskets. Pocket maps. Beaver round hats. Striped drugget. Thousands of objects, remarkable and mundane, were in motion as the British American colonies moved toward revolution. Some of those objects tell little-known local histories. Others offer insight into much larger, global histories. All are portholes letting us see the history of the revolutionary era from new and unexpected angles.
As the United States prepares to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the American Historical Association has launched a new project, ’76 Objects: A Special Issue of the American Historical Review, to be published in June 2026.
In ’76 Objects, material culture of the revolutionary era takes center stage as a method of historical inquiry and teaching. As a journal that encompasses all historical geographies, the AHR will take a global approach to the era’s history through a diverse range of objects located in museums and at historical sites across the United States and the globe.
Each object will be interpreted in an essay of approximately 1,000-word essay that offers new or different insights into the world of the revolution in the Americas and beyond. We expect the objects to be grouped into sections, each with an introductory synthetic essay. In addition to the print and online versions of the journal, this project will have an expanded digital component. The issue is designed to engage multiple audiences in the history of these objects and the period (roughly 1750s-1780s).
Histories of Resilience
December 2024
Vol 129 | Issue 4
Check out the AHR special issue on histories of resilience. Contributions explore how resilience has been expressed historically in various cultural contexts and how communities have fostered resilience while negotiating conditions provoked by chronic adversity, catastrophes, and structural economic and racial inequalities. Members can access the issue online through the link under AHA Publications on MYAHA.