The AHA website, including Perspectives on History, has a completely new look. In today’s digital world, an organization’s website offers crucial opportunities for connections and education. The AHA website receives millions of views—many from students—each year and is a key touchpoint for both historians and members of the public interested in history and historians’ work. We designed the new site to reinforce the AHA’s mission of promoting the critical role of historical thinking in public life. Visitors to historians.org will learn one thing above all else: history matters.
Since 2022, when we started this redesign process, we asked repeatedly, How do we show the public why history and the work of historians matter? How do we ensure that our publications and educational resources are easy to access—not just by members but also by educators and students from other disciplines, journalists, legislators, and other professionals? With focus groups, we considered how different audiences use the site and what they seek there. Accessibility also was central to this redesign. Our old site lacked key accessibility features, such as the ability to include alt text for all images. But the new site, hosted on WordPress, meets standard accessibility guidelines and will allow us to adhere to standards as they’re updated. Its new design and structure emphasize the deep connections among the historical community, the value of history education from K–12 through graduate school, and the Association’s leadership in the discipline. Improving the user experience, providing easier access to our vast educational resources and publications, and highlighting the Association’s wide-ranging work were our core objectives.
This new site emphasizes that everything has a history. And, in fact, so does historians.org. When I joined the AHA staff in 2020, I was pleased and surprised to learn that historians Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird generously had donated the domain name historians.org to the AHA. I worked with Marty and Kai during my previous job at the Atomic Heritage Foundation, and learning about this unexpected relationship between my work at the AHA and at AHF made me appreciate the many connections that bring us together as a community. We have worked to replicate that sense of community by sharing photographs of attendees at AHA events, spotlighting our talented membership, sharing information about events and opportunities from the AHA and our partners, and the many other ways the Association convenes and fosters connections among historians everywhere, both in person and online.
Learning the origins of the site domain reinforced for me the importance of the website as an archive of the Association’s work. Since 1884, the AHA has confronted a range of controversies about history education, academic freedom, archival access, departmental and institutional funding, and other issues that affect historians’ work. Some of these issues echo loudly in the present, with resonances that the website documents. For example, a 1923 AHA resolution on “History Teaching in the Schools” warned that “attempts, however well meant, to foster national arrogance and boastfulness and indiscriminate worship of national ‘heroes’ can only tend to promote a harmful pseudo patriotism.” Historians from a century ago would be surprised—or perhaps not—to learn that the Association is still combating efforts to restrict history education and still supporting history educators facing controversies about the teaching of the American past.
The AHA site offers thousands of educational resources and thousands more articles from Perspectives. As we built the new site, I often found myself distracted by older but still insightful articles. I was especially moved by Natalie Zemon Davis’s reflection in her 1996 essay, “Why Become a Historian?” She wrote, “I still find history full of wonders; I still find in the differences in past societies a way to take stock of the present—a source of sober realism, but also a source of hope.” We hope you, too, will find things on our website that fill you with wonder or serve as a source of hope.
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