Broadening Our Collective Work

On July 1, 2025, Sarah Weicksel started a five-year term as executive director of the AHA. She knows the AHA well after serving on the staff since 2020 as a research coordinator and then director of research and publications. Sarah is a historian of material culture in the United States who previously worked in both museums and academic settings; her book, A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era, will be published in January 2026 by the University of North Carolina Press.

Perspectives sat down with Weicksel to discuss her roots in California, how she navigated academia as a first-generation student, and how her professional experiences across the history discipline have influenced her goals for the AHA.

You grew up on your family’s farm in California. How does that influence you?

Growing up in California when I did, it felt like a place that seemingly had no history. In school, we studied things that happened on the East Coast. We learned about the Gold Rush and built missions out of macaroni in elementary school, and that was pretty much it as far as California history was concerned.

But on our farm, I was surrounded by all sorts of old things dating back a hundred years. Our house and barn were built by my great-grandpa in the late 1910s, and our barn still had farm implements that dated back to the early 1900s. We had the wagon that my great-grandpa used to deliver raisins to Sun-Maid, driving a six-horse team; equipment that my grandpa converted from horse-drawn to tractor-pulled in the mid-20th century; all the way up to my dad’s cab tractor from the mid-1990s. All these layers of farming equipment and history were in our barn—along with what I often referred to as a thick layer of hundred-year-old dust.

I suppose all those old things have something to do with my interest in material culture, but being from the West Coast has also resulted in me constantly trying to bring Western history into the way that I look at things. Although my scholarship has not focused on that, I’m constantly trying to think about how we ensure that we’re telling the entire nation’s story.

And then you went to Yale University as a first-generation college student. That must have been a whole new world!

It was a major culture shock. I went to school in town but spent summers fairly isolated out on our farm. I had summer jobs—I packed tree fruit and helped with my family’s grape and almond harvests. At Yale, suddenly, I was in a bustling city with a lot of cars and a lot of people, who had experiences that were very different from mine.

I felt very out of place—everyone seemed more widely read than I was. I distinctly remember sitting in classes on historical and political thought and on literature, having struggled to get through Herodotus and Homer. And there I was listening to some of my classmates debating what the original Greek said. It felt overwhelming.

Then I took a Western history course from John Mack Faragher, whose lecture slides were full of images and objects, another from Ned Cooke on early American decorative arts, and one from Alexander Nemerov on 19th-century politics and art. John Demos brought in objects from his own antiques collection as part of his colonial history class. And I discovered this entirely different way of exploring the past.

So in some ways, it was discovering material culture as a historical source that helped me come into my own in the classroom—it was how I regained my confidence. I’ve often described it as my academic lifeline. It hooked me on continuing to be a history major, and ultimately to go on to attend the Winterthur program, so I could develop skills in doing history through objects, then take that on to a history PhD at the University of Chicago.

What was the first object that lit a fire within you about material culture?

You know, I can’t really remember a specific object. But I distinctly remember noticing the hats that people were wearing in the paintings we were studying for class. And I realized that how people were dressed, and what their clothes were intended to convey, was something that could be debated. It sparked my interest.

I’m very much a historian who follows the sources.

Were those hats the start of your study of clothing as a historical source?

I actually avoided clothing and textiles as a topic of study for much of my career, really—or thought I did. I wasn’t interested in the minutiae of textile analysis or fashion history. And yet I have just finished a book on clothing and the American Civil War. I’ve always been more interested in thinking about combinations of objects within the context of the built environment—a sort of reconstructing how the past looked and felt, and how that influenced people’s worldviews. When I started working on my book, I had no intention whatsoever of working on clothes. I was planning a project about Civil War looting that involved all sorts of objects. But I’m very much a historian who follows the sources, and the sources were telling me that there was something about clothing that was extraordinarily important during the war. I found so many references to clothing being stolen, destroyed and ripped up, packaged and sent thousands of miles away. And so much vitriol over clothing. I felt compelled to revise my driving question to figure out just what it was about clothing that was so important to this war and to the people who were living through it.

How did you end up working on the Civil War?

In part, it felt like the next step in the kind of research I had been doing, and it was the period I’d been circling around but never focused on. My master’s degree work at the Winterthur Museum focused on 18th- and early 19th-century material culture. My master’s thesis there was on the development of shopping destinations in Philadelphia in the first half of the century. At UChicago, I wrote on a range of topics on the 19th century, from women’s medical history to church fundraising fairs to the development of tearooms and women’s food-related businesses in late 19th-century Chicago. There were books that just opened up so many questions for me, like Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage, Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, and Stephanie McCurry’s Confederate Reckoning. The questions these books left me with were so compelling that I wanted to find the answers. Objects and people were in constant motion during the war. I wanted to take my deep understanding of the material world and use it to understand what loss meant—not just in the Confederate context, but the complete disruption of daily life experienced by Black refugees in the South and US soldiers.

After four years at Yale, did you still feel out of place when you started a master’s program, and then later an MA-PhD program?

I was the first in my family to earn a bachelor’s degree and to attend a four-year school, and I was lucky that my professors helped me to navigate academia. They helped me understand why I would want to go to Winterthur first instead of straight into a PhD program, which was always my intention. And at Winterthur, I was prepared both for going on to get a PhD and to become a museum professional. Those experiences helped orient me to the types of jobs that might be available. But even though I successfully made it through college and a master’s program, a PhD program was entirely different. It required being willing to ask questions to clarify exactly what it was I was supposed to be doing, and to seek out people who would mentor me along the way.

Several people guided me. For example, when I started the program Christine Stansell helped me refine my ability to make a historical argument, while still maintaining my writing style. I spent hours with Kathleen Conzen, talking about our family histories, about historical methods, about trying to uncover the very mundane social history of ordinary people. Leora Auslander helped me to refine my approach as a historian who worked with things and what precisely that meant. Leora and Kathy co-chaired my committee and they were there every step of the way to help me make decisions about my research, as well as my career. For me, there was never going to be a single path after a PhD—I never felt boxed into a single profession. But mentors throughout my education were absolutely critical in helping me navigate academia.

Now you’ve worked in jobs across the historical discipline—as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania; as a project historian at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History; and as research coordinator and then director of research and publications here at the AHA. What has that breadth of experience taught you about the discipline today?

I’ve worked in museums from the Menokin Foundation on the Northern Neck of Virginia that, at the time, was a covered ruin of the house, a trailer for an office, and an outhouse, all the way to a large institution like the Smithsonian. I’ve taught undergraduate and graduate students and worked on exhibitions for the general public. Those experiences have given me a sense of three things: the breadth of the discipline of history, the diversity of people who are working in it, and the multitudes of reasons that people connect with history. They have influenced my desire to see the AHA become a bigger tent organization, and to advocate for a discipline that is not a closed community to which one must gain acceptance, but rather a space of welcome and support that connects historians from all backgrounds and professions.

What were the best parts of those jobs?

At UChicago, I loved advising BA theses and teaching historical methodology seminars. Helping students take an inkling of an idea and turn it into a full-fledged research project that they could really feel invested in and proud of at the end was something that I enjoyed a lot.

At the Smithsonian, one of my favorite projects was an exhibit that’s currently up called Really BIG Money, because it was so different from anything I’d done before. It was a curatorial experiment of sorts, co-curated from the beginning by two historians and two museum educators. It’s designed for a primary audience of 3rd to 5th graders, while still doing something that is appealing to adults. It allowed me to work with completely different eras and object types, from a quetzal bird to a Roman coin hoard.

At the AHA, Teaching Things has been one of the most fulfilling of my projects. It was designed to help instructors bring material culture into history classrooms and was an opportunity to do—on a large scale—the kind of curriculum development I’d been working on for over a decade, through convening workshops at conferences and through trial and error in my own classroom. Working with a team who is similarly committed to using objects in the classroom has been a highlight of my time at the AHA. I hope that my years of work encouraging the use of objects in history classrooms will in some way contribute to other students finding their path forward, and perhaps even strengthening their academic confidence.

Looking forward, what are your priorities for the AHA?

I want to help lead the discipline forward in ways that can unite the different facets of historical work, and the various people who are practicing it, to continue to broaden our definitions of historical scholarship, and to really embrace the vibrancy of our discipline. I want to increase the number of historians who see the AHA as their professional home by fostering a culture that makes trained historians who are working outside academia essential to our collective work.

We need to attend to the full ecosystem of the discipline.

We need to attend to the full ecosystem of the discipline, from K–12 education to higher ed, and encourage broad public support for history and history education. That’s particularly difficult at this moment, because history has become so heavily politicized. The various threats to telling good, evidence-based history have shape-shifted over the last several years, and they continue to build. I want to ensure that the AHA can intervene in those debates, to help the public and policymakers understand that history, historical evidence, and history education are essential and deserve bipartisan support.

I’m excited to be tackling the current landscape of humanities graduate education through our new collaboration on the Doctoral Futures project with the ACLS, MLA, and Society of Biblical Literature. I also want to better connect history graduate students to the Association by building on our Career Diversity initiative and identifying new ways that we can support them in their professional development and careers. I want to better support both non-tenure-track faculty members and independent scholars without access to a university library system so they can continue pursuing their research-related goals. I personally know the challenge of trying to do scholarship without research access. In recent years, we’ve added new member benefits some of which proved central to me being able to get my book done, because we as AHA staff don’t have access to a university library. There are difficult issues facing our discipline that go beyond what the AHA can address. But that doesn’t mean that we should stop trying.

So you left the farm 20 years ago, but you’re still putting your hands in the dirt. What’s going on in your garden right now?

In general, the chaos of keeping our two dogs out of my plantings. My vegetable garden is starting to produce, and over the last several years, I’ve been converting our back lawn into a garden full of Maryland native plants. Looking out and seeing the shifting diversity of wildlife over the years has been quite amazing. This year, the plants have started to mature, and there are now several types of butterflies and dragonflies, hummingbirds, toads, gray tree and pickerel frogs, and species of bees I have never seen before. Pairs of cardinals, goldfinches, and other native birds are nesting there. One of the things that I enjoy most is trying out a new plant this year and seeing how it does, and then bringing in another one the next year. Learning to grow produce and flowers in an entirely different climate and gardening zone has been a good challenge.