Sarah Weicksel is executive director of the American Historical Association. She has previously worked as the Association’s director of research and publications and as a project historian at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She serves on the National Archives Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Advisory Committee.
Her book, A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2026), is an object-based history that explores how making, wearing, saving, and destroying clothing was central to how people waged war and acutely experienced war’s costs. Her articles have focused on various aspects of nineteenth century US history, military history, gender history, and material culture.
Weicksel’s work has emphasized the use of artifacts in history teaching. She is the project director of the AHA’s NEH grant-funded project, Teaching Things, and author of a related article, A Case for Objects: Material Culture in the History Classroom, published in the American Historical Review.
Weicksel earned a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, an MA in American material culture from the Winterthur Program at the University of Delaware, and a BA in history from Yale University.