As June comes to a close, we are coming to the end of the first month of the 2024 AHA Summer Reading Challenge. We asked AHA members, Council, and staff to share with us what history they had read in June to fulfill tasks in #AHAReads, and we’ve compiled some of their responses.
Read a history of a place you’re visiting this summer.
Laura Ansley (AHA senior managing editor) took Pat Staton’s It Was Their War Too: Canadian Women in World War I with her to Prince Edward Island in early June.
Katie Singer (Whittier Coll.) prepared for a trip to Paris with Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France by Robin Mitchell.
Read a history by a scholar whose day job is outside academia.
Shauna Liverotti (National Council for History Education) started the challenge with Matthew Taylor’s Black Redcoats: The Corps of Colonial Marines, 1814–1816.
Michael Romero (Williamsburg, Virginia) enjoyed Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World by Eric Jay Dolin.
Gabriel Valdez (Fort Worth Independent School District) read Linda R. Monk’s The Words We Live By: Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution.
Melissa Ziobro (Monmouth Univ. and Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music) checked out Commanding Professionalism: Simpson, Moore, and the Ninth US Army by William Stuart Nance, an active duty armor officer.
Read a piece of historical fiction set in the time or place you study.
Jenny Baniewicz (Amos Alonzo Stagg High School and AHA Council) recommends Kate Quinn’s The Diamond Eye, based on a true story of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, one of the most well-known women snipers in the Russian Army during World War II.
Alexandra Levy (AHA communications director) revisited a favorite World War II novel, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
Patrick Sheridan (Univ. of Georgia) revisited an earlier research project on 1920s Florida via Chanel Cleeton’s The House on Biscayne Bay.
For her second book this month, Melissa Ziobro could not put Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai down.
Learn from a historian presenting their scholarship in an amicus brief, digital collection, exhibition, podcast, video, or another format outside traditional academic publishing.
For her second task this month, Laura Ansley read an amicus curiae brief submitted by Lauren MacIvor Thompson, Joseph Gabriel, Dominique Tobbell, Jeremy Greene, David Herzberg, Cara Delay, Kelly O’Donnell, and Lucas Richert regarding Genbiopro v. Raynes, a case being considered by the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals involving Food and Drug Administration approval of a generic form of the drug mifepristone.
It’s not too late to join the challenge! Simply select three tasks to complete before Labor Day. Post about your reading on the AHA Member Forum or on social media using the hashtag #AHAReads. You might even see your books show up in a future post on Perspectives Daily.
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