As summer comes to a close, the third and final month of the AHA Summer Reading Challenge ends with it. We asked AHA members, Council, and staff to share with us what history they read in August to finish #AHAReads, and we’ve compiled some of their responses
Read a history of an event with a major anniversary in 2025.
For the 800th anniversary of the 1225 revision of the Magna Carta, John Santucci (Open Univ.) picked up Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction by Nicholas Vincent.
Read a history of a resistance movement.
One participant completed the entire challenge using American Girl books, a choice that delighted the AHA staff! For this task, Meghan Titzer (Boston, Massachusetts) read Samantha Learns a Lesson by Susan S. Adler, which delves into child labor in the early 20th century.
Read a history that uses material culture.
Jason Burnett (Minneapolis, Minnesota) learned about the military roots of current fashions by reading Icons of Style: In 100 Garments by John Sims.
Brendan Gillis (AHA director of teaching and learning) picked up Zara Anishanslin’s The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution.
Michael Novak (Alexandria, Virginia) turned to print culture with Citizen Carl: The Editor Who Cracked Teapot Dome, Shot a Judge, and Invented the Parking Meter, Jack McElroy’s biography of newspaper editor Carl Magee.
Amy Powers (Waubonsee Community Coll.) read Iroquoia: Haudenosaunee Life and Culture, 1630–1783 by Kelly Y. Hopkins, who uses “maps, housing, commodities—even settlement patterns—to explain how the Haudenosaunee used ingenuity, flexibility, and creativity to protect their communities.”
Jonathan Sassi (Coll. of Staten Island and Graduate Center, CUNY), frequent train passenger to and from New York’s Penn Station, enjoyed David Alff’s The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region.
Read an edited collection, journal forum, or other multiauthor work.
Laura Ansley (director of publications) read Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale by Averill Earls, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Marissa C. Rhodes, and Elizabeth Garner Masarik, the producers of Dig: A History Podcast.
Read a history that’s been sitting on your shelf too long.
Michael Ralston (Washington, DC) read Vladimir Tismaneanu’s The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century, which he picked up as comparative context on communist and authoritarian regimes in Asia.
Patrick Sheridan (Univ. of Georgia) picked up Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe by Stuart Carroll.
Trysh Travis (Univ. of Florida) pulled two books off her shelf for this task: Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (vol. IV) and J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families.
Read a piece of historical fiction (novel, story, poem, play).
Steve Davis (Lone Star Coll., Kingswood) read Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, which he plans to assign in a future US history course.
Debbie Ann Doyle (AHA director of meetings) read a murder mystery by Katharine Schellman. Last Call at the Nightingale is set in 1920s New York City and “is clearly based on reading queer, gender, and urban history.”
Mallory Hutchings-Tryon (Univ. of Washington and AHA intern) loved Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires, an alt-history of the encounter between Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma.
Mike Korschek (Falls Church, Virginia) read an alt-history of the medieval Mediterranean called All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay.
Alexandra F. Levy (AHA director of communications and public affairs) loves a book about space, so she enjoyed Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid about the US space shuttle program in the 1980s.
Thank you to everyone who participated in #AHAReads!
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