The American Historical Review (AHR), the journal of the American Historical Association, has launched Authoritarianism 101: A Global History, a new series of primary source-driven teaching modules designed to offer teachers and students a broad perspective on the history of authoritarianism.
The AHR commissioned teaching modules from historians working on authoritarian histories in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, Africa, and Latin America that explore a singular instance of an authoritarian past, ranging from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first. There will be over thirty modules in total, and the first eighteen modules are currently available online and free to read.
“Many of the modules are concerned with the practices of authoritarianism and the tools of authoritarian control,” AHR editor Mark Philip Bradley and consulting editor Laura McEnaney write in the project’s introduction. “They go to the political, economic, social, or cultural dimensions of a particular authoritarian turn; aspects of the daily workings of an authoritarian regime; the ways in which authoritarian states have sought to foster their legitimacy; authoritarian surveillance and censorship; authoritarianism and the judiciary; and how individuals and non-state actors have supported and collaborated with authoritarian rulers. Other modules concentrate on resistance to an authoritarian turn and explore the everyday histories of living under authoritarianism.”
The American Historical Review (AHR) has served as the journal of record for the historical discipline in the United States since 1895. It is the leading global forum for new scholarship in every major field of historical study across time and space. The AHR publishes field-transforming articles and contributions that reimagine historical practice and teaching.