AHA Today
Staff
CIA Releases “Family Jewels” on Agency Web Site
As it promised last week, the CIA released yesterday a 702 page document known as the “family jewels.” The document…
BibMe: Build Bibliographies in a Couple of Clicks
The new website BibMe claims to be “the quickest way to build a works cited page.” While that assertion is…
Yellow Pages for the Academic Blogosphere
There are tons of blogs out there (upwards of 70 million according to Technorati founder Dave Sifry), but the overwhelming…
CIA to Release Decades of Dirty Laundry
Speaking at a meeting of The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Director of the CIA General Michael V.…
Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright
Though Library of Congress receives about 2,400 copyright applications per business day, the process of registering a copyright is still…
Overhaul at the Smithsonian
The Smithsonian has announced the resignation of Sheila Burke who has been the Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer since…
Feeling the Pressure: A Report from the AAUP Meeting
The university presses are enjoying modestly better days financially, but still seem to be struggling through an identity crisis arising…
AHA President Participates in Discussion on Visa Problems of Foreign Scholars
Calls for Concerted Action AHA President Barbara Weinstein recently participated in a live, online discussion about the difficulties experienced by…
Chicago Journals partners with American Historical Association to publish American Historical Review
The University of Chicago Press and the American Historical Association (AHA) are pleased to announce a new cooperative agreement to…
National History Day Winners Announced
National History Day, which we reported on in a post last week, concluded bright and early yesterday with an awards…
Where Do We Go from Here? Reinvigorating Historical Education
Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein presented opening remarks at yesterday’s National History Center conference “Reforming History Education: New…
From the Archives: Reflections on a PhD in History
What is required of a student pursuing a history PhD? How many history PhDs should universities grant? Once a PhD…
Visiting Ancient Rome via the Web
For the past ten years, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia has been…
Time for a Second Opinion: PhDinHistory
For anyone interested in the challenges and prospects for doctoral candidates in history, PhDinHistory offers a useful counterpoint to reports…
Archivist Discovers Long-lost Lincoln Letter
“Wow!” That was archivist Trevor Plante’s initial reaction when it dawned on him that the faded, yellow letter in his…
National History Day Contest Commences at the Univ. of Maryland this Weekend
This year’s National History Day Contest challenged students in grades 6-12 to create original papers, exhibits, documentaries, and performances around…
Remembering D-Day
At 3:30 a.m. on June 6, 1944, Peter Fantacone was feeling queasy. He and his fellow sailors had spent the…
AHA Council Supports Statement Against Detention of Scholars in Iran
At its semiannual meeting on Sunday June 3, 2007, the AHA Council released the following statement (see the press room…
AHA Council Endorses NCHE Statement on Teacher Qualifications
At its semiannual meeting on Sunday June 3, 2007, the AHA Council released the following statement: Upon recommendation from the…
Public History Defined?
At its annual meeting in Santa Fe, which took place April 12 to 15, the Board of Directors of the…
National History Center Assembles Conference on “Reforming History Education”
The National History Center will convene a day-long conference on reforms in history education policy on June 12th at the…
University Libraries Embrace Print-On-Demand Partnerships
Rare and out-of-print books from both Cornell University Library and Emory University are getting new life through print-on-demand services. In…
“No Child” Leaves the Social Studies Behind
Moving past the usual alarmist anecdotes, a new study by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) offers hard evidence that…
DSpace – The Future of Online Archives?
Last week the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hewlett-Packard announced the launch of the DSpace Foundation, endowed with a half-million…
From the Archives: GI Roundtable Revisited
Creating the Series Kenneth Colgrove, a professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, wrote to Guy Stanton Ford of the…
Crawford Young Gives Free Lecture on the African Colonial State
Tomorrow, July 25th, University of Wisconsin professor emeritus Crawford Young will give a free public lecture at the Library of…
The Journey of a Thousand Miles: New Findings on Attrition from History Ph.D. Programs
Less than half of all history doctoral students will complete their studies within ten years, according to a new study…
Waskar Ari Finally Wins Visa
After a two year struggle, Bolivian historian Waskar Ari finally gained a visa to teach at the University of Nebraska…
Doc of the Day
The National Archives’ web site has an interesting little feature called “Today’s Document.” Each day a scanned image of a…
Accessing the Government Online
You may have visited the Library of Congress’s web site, or even the National Archives online, but you’re missing out…
James McPherson Awarded the First Pritzker Award
Past AHA President and Civil War historian James McPherson has been awarded the first ever Pritzker Military Library Literature Award…
Preserving Blogs
In her “On Doing Local History” column in the winter issue of the American Association for State and Local History’s…
PhDinHistory is Back
Happily, the PhDinHistory blog returned to the Internet last night at https://phdinhistory.blogspot.com/, as the previously anonymous author decided to make…
Nobel Peace Prize Curriculum Available on the Web
Can your students name the 22 American Nobel Peace Prize Laureates?* The Nobel Peace Laureate Project has developed a high…
From the Archives: The National Park Service
Parks and the Shaping of Historical Memory In a Perspectivesarticle from January 2000, historians Laura Feller and Page Putnam Miller…
Nixon Library Tears Down Watergate Exhibit to Build Anew
The Richard Nixon Library is going through changes. Timothy Naftali, the library’s first federally appointed director of just one year,…
A Sudden End to PhDinHistory
Sadly, the PhDinHistory blog closed its digital shutters and went offline over the weekend, apparently permanently. In its brief four…
Dog Days in D.C.: Some Things Never Change
Illustrating how the more things change, the more they stay the same, we present this brief editorial written 147 years…
Upcoming Public Lecture from the National History Center
This coming Tuesday, July 10th, the National History Center will be holding a free public lecture by William Roger Louis,…
Dept. of Education Seeks Panel Reviewers for Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program
The Department of Education is seeking panel reviewers to evaluate applications from students applying for Jacob K. Javits Fellowships for…
June Issue of the American Historical Review Online Now
The June issue of the American Historical Review contains two articles and an AHR Forum. One article offers an argument…
Old Pictures Get New Life on Shorpy
Shorpy, the self-proclaimed “100-Year-Old Photo Blog,” displays images from the “dawn of photography to the 1940s.” Images like, “Cutting Crew:…
Robert K. Sutton selected as Chief Historian, National Park Service
The National Park Service (NPS) has announced the selection of Robert K. Sutton as Chief Historian of the National Park…
Experience “Turning the Pages” at the British Library Online
The British Library is reaching out to readers online by allowing them to digitally “leaf through our great books” on…
What’s New on the Calendar?
The AHA’s online calendar allows organizations and universities the opportunity to advertise meetings and seminars, research opportunities, awards & fellowships,…
Tracked in America
Trackedinamerica.org is a new web site that provides a short history of U.S. government surveillance in America from the colonial…
Historical Moments Captured in the Newseum’s Front Page Archive
While the physical Newseum, the interactive museum of news, is yet to open in D.C., its web site is very…
Finding the Right Word: New AHA Policies for Adding and Deleting Membership Categories
As the dustup last fall about the deletion of “psychohistory” from our membership taxonomy indicated, inclusion on the AHA’s list…
Tickets Still Available for “A Day with James McPherson”
Just a few seats remain for the “A Day with James McPherson” colloquium, taking place this Saturday, August 25 at…
Who Wields the Red Pen?
Wired magazine has reported another effort to unmask unreliable Wikipedia contributors, quite similar to one we reported on last week. …
National History Center Posts Online Videos of Presentations
The National History Center (NHC) “promotes research, teaching, and learning in all fields of history” by many means, including: seminars,…
Get the Feed from the Library of Congress
Not only did the Library of Congress join the blogosphere, they’ve also wholeheartedly embraced all things RSS, to keep the…
Recent Updates from the National Coalition for History
The National Coalition for History’s Leland White has posted a flurry of Washington updates since last week. His coverage includes:…
Member News Wanted
From time to time, Perspectives runs the Members column, which provides space for AHA members to share with their colleagues…
National History Center Collects Surveys to Study the History Major and Liberal Education
Earlier this year, the National History Center (NHC) created the Teagle Foundation Project, through a grant from the Teagle Foundation,…
The Red Pen of Truth?
The reliability of the information contained in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is a contentious topic in academia, as well as…
AP African American History and the Minority Question in History
Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed offers a fascinating article about an effort to create AP courses in African American…
Preparing for the National Park Services Second Century: George Wright Society Introduces Essay Series on the National Park Service
In 2016 the U.S. National Park Service will celebrate its 100th anniversary. In anticipation of that event, the George Wright…
BlackPast.org – An Online Gateway to African American History
BlackPast.org, led by University of Washington Professor and former AHA Council member Quintard Taylor, contains an abundance of resources on…
Pells Bells: The End of Cultural History?
In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Richard Pells (a historian at the University of Texas at Austin) charges, “The…
Smithsonian Fires Gary Beer
In a bit of “here we go again”, the Smithsonian has fired Gary M. Beer, the CEO of Smithsonian Ventures…
The National Archives Opens its Vaults to Amazon
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced last week its plan to make over 200,000 copies of archived video…
History on the Digital Margins
Manan Ahmed is an organizer of the roundtable session Contested Pasts and Presents: History and Memory in the Local at…