Authoritarianism 101

Daniel Story
I’m Daniel Story, and this is History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review.

With the March 2026 issue, the AHR will launch Authoritarianism 101: A Global History. Part of the #AHRSyllabus project, A101 (as we’re calling it), means to offer history teachers (and students) focused and accessible resources to explore the history of authoritarianism in a wide variety of places and historical time periods.

The core of A101 is thirty modules from thirty different contributors. Each module contains three main components: a core question about the history of authoritarianism, a single primary source students can use to explore that question, and a short essay that offers historical context around that primary source as well as ideas for teachers on how to approach teaching it. Rooted in specific places, times, and events, collectively the modules explore a wide range of questions on authoritarian histories, from how state and non-state actors seek to enact authoritarian programs, to how resistance to authoritarianism has played out, to everyday life in authoritarian regimes.

In the March issue, you’ll find the first six modules, with the remainder appearing over the next few issues. Ultimately, all thirty will be available to access for free through the AHR’s publisher, Oxford University Press. Additionally, later in April, we’ll be launching a landing page for the project on the AHR’s website, which you can access at historians.org/a101. You’ll find the modules there too, but also several short videos related to specific modules and, yes, podcast episodes produced specifically for history students.

One again, the first six modules will be in the March 2026 issue, the website will launch sometime in April. And the remainder of the modules will be published in the journal and on the site over the next few months. More resources will be on the site too, which you will be able to access at historians.org/a101.

Spearheading Authoritarianism 101 is AHR editor Mark Bradley and brand new consulting editor for the #AHRSyllabus project Laura McEnaney. I spoke with Mark and Laura about the project’s origins, what it is history teachers can expect from the A101 modules, and how AHR hopes teachers and students will engage.

So Mark, Laura, it’s really great to talk to you. And I wanted to start maybe just by asking you, where this Authoritarianism 101 project came from, the origins, and what were your motivations to pursue this kind of thing for the AHR.

Mark Bradley
Well, you know, in the two parts of the world that I work on as a historian—I work on Asia, and I work on the United States—it’s fair to say that since 2000 there has been a kind of shift in political formations. And to start really with Asia, you know, quite a big shift from a sort of move toward people thinking about a kind of democratic wave in Asia, to a return to the kinds of authoritarian politics that we saw more commonly in, you know, the 1960s and the 1970s and so you talk to colleagues, and you talk to students, you know, who are working in those fields, and they’re historians, but, you know, they can’t help but be curious about the present moment. And so the question is, there was a democratic wave, and now we’re back at authoritarianism. You know, how did that happen? And also, we don’t remember authoritarianism as well as we did before. So, you know, what did those histories look like? Yeah, and so thinking about how to help people get there. The United States is more recent, you know, with the election of the current president, there is a lot of talk in the country about what kind of regime we have, and a variety of descriptors have been put on that, one of which is authoritarianism. This project isn’t designed to decide whether the President is or is not running an authoritarian regime, but simply to say that in a more global frame, there is this movement toward a particular kind of politics. If I work on Asia in the United States, my colleagues in European history, my colleagues in Middle Eastern history, in African history, in Latin American history, people are seeing this all over the world. And so what made sense to us was that it be a global history project, and that we were able to simultaneously talk across regions about the histories of authoritarianism and in hopes that those ways of seeing in a variety of national and continental spaces would help people think about the present moment in historically informed ways.

Laura McEnaney
And I would add, as an Americanist, I study war in society, particularly World War Two and the Cold War, there’s an opportunity, not only to help put this current moment in a longer context, but to ask new questions of things we’ve studied before, is Japanese American internment, an episode of wartime authoritarianism that’s not often a frame that teachers will use. Its McCarthyism, a strand of governmental authoritarianism, and so it allows people to take episodes that they’ve taught before and rethink them, put a new lens on them, apply new questions and to think about them in broader ways, in connection with global histories of authoritarianism.

Mark Bradley
So if that’s in broad breaststrokes, what we were thinking about as this project came together. We could have done it in all kinds of different ways. We could have done the classic AHR forum histories of authoritarianism, you know. And it could have operated in more of a kind of direct research mode, right? But as we talked to people about it, what people kept saying was, my students are asking me about this, and I don’t know where to go and where to send them or where to you know, think about what to do in the classroom, and that’s where we started to think that the urgency of this really was trying to find some of the leading historians of authoritarianism from around the world and asking them if they might be willing to put together a teaching module, very specifically focused, and we can talk in a little bit about what those focuses look like. And Daniel, I was stunned, you know, it’s not easy getting people to get to yes, you know, yeah. I invited 30 people, and I would say, within a week, almost all of them had said yes, and then I wrote back and I said, and you know, the other thing I didn’t really tell you is that we need it tomorrow. And they all wrote back and said, you’ll get it tomorrow. And in truth, in almost every case, we did so it also felt as if we were working with a group of people who were saying, yeah, there is something in this moment that we’re all trying to figure out together, and we want to be a part of this. So it had a kind of, you know, solidarity across scholars, across places that’s been very nice to see as it’s come together.

Daniel Story
Yeah, a real sense of urgency, a sense of this is really meaningful work for this moment. Yeah, I think that’s really exciting. So could you both talk a little bit about the shape of this project in more specifics? You know, when a reader of the AHR or or maybe more specifically, a teacher comes to authoritarianism, 101 material, what are they going to find?

Mark Bradley
Well, they’re going to find, ultimately, 30 modules. And again, we’ve been very careful about commissioning modules across time and space. So the earliest module is back in the 16th century. The most recent module is, you know, early, 2000s and everything in between. And again, making sure that we’re moving around various geographical regions. What we wanted, though, was a kind of uniformity in terms of the structure of the modules, and we thought that that would be easier for teachers to kind of get a handle on it, so every module is organized in a similar kind of way. We asked people to do a core question, and that the core question was bigger than just the case that they were going to explore, but the core question would think about, where is the rule of law in authoritarian rule? What does it mean to think about everyday histories of authoritarianism? How surprisingly are elections important to authoritarian regimes. But again, those questions operated in a kind of bigger rather than geographic space, and that the module was a way to start to unpack some of those bigger questions. So we asked everybody for one primary source, just one, it could be a textual source, it could be a visual source, and we’ve got plenty of interesting sources that are both and then that they would provide a short essay that gave some context. So how do we think about the larger context around this source? And then a teaching discussion that would help teachers, very specifically think about the ways to help their students unpack the module, to unpack the primary source, and ultimately to get back to that bigger question. So each module has that basic format all the way through. And we hope that that won’t seem repetitive, but that that’ll actually be kind of reassuring to people. Okay, here’s the structure. This is the way this works, and then it will allow them to curate out the ones that they might want to use, right, right?

Laura McEnaney
And speaking of curation, I would add that, you know, I was a classroom teacher for 25 years. I taught the US history survey for 25 years, and every Sunday night, you’re looking on the internet for great sources. I mean, of course, as a historian, you understand the core questions of your discipline. You bring your own scholarship that of your colleagues, but you’re still looking for ways to translate scholarship into lively, engaging and compelling teaching conversations. And it’s not that there’s a lack of sources out there, it’s that there’s this decentralized abundance that teachers have to wade through often in subject areas that are not their specialties, because so many, especially high school teachers, have to be generalists, but that also includes university professors as well. And so what we’re trying to do with these self contained modules is take care of the things that teachers need to anticipate. Those needs, deliver some things that can help them with that curation, with that structuring of a lesson plan, and to sort of help them anchor the lesson in a context and a set of questions, that can give them a really productive running start. And then, teachers are experts. They understand how to craft a lesson, and they can build the rest around that, but we give them a lot of raw material, and the reason we structured this around a core question is because so many students, and we see this from surveys of how students understand history, they think about it as a recitation of facts, but historians know it as a discipline of questions, and our students bring those questions to class all the time. These are why questions. These are how questions. And we follow those questions into the archives. We go to the documents. We do what historians do best, and we analyze documents. We try to understand a narrative, we try to reconstruct a narrative, and then we try to offer a series of working hypotheses. But the next part of that is exciting for both scholars and teachers. We join an ongoing conversation of scholars who have looked at these questions, who have asked these questions. Who have gone to the archives and come out again and said, Wait, there’s another way to look at this question. There’s another frame we can use. And so we join ongoing conversations, but we make new ones with these modules, hopefully ideally for teachers in their classrooms.

Mark Bradley
I think the other thing maybe, just to quickly add in, you know, high school teachers came up as Laura was was talking, and one of the things that we wanted to work hard at right from the kind of get go, was that these modules could work in university and college classrooms, but potentially they could also work in high school classrooms. And we recognized that some modules may not be as good a fit in high school, but we think, or are hopeful, that many of them will be. And so once we had modules in hand, and we were trying to think about ways to do peer review, because that’s what we do in the American Historical Review, some of it was content, and we wanted to make sure that other people who were working in those fields were looking at this and saying, you know, okay, that’s working. Or, you know, adjust this, adjust that, they’re going to need more to get to that document, you know, the classic kind of peer review. But we also have been shopping the modules to teachers, and specifically to high school teachers, and just trying to get a sense about, you know, what would teach? Are there some complications that might arise in some of them that could be specific to, you know, the high school classroom, and ways of addressing those in the modules?

Laura McEnaney
Yeah, I would add one more thing about the modules, because they’re both about delivering content, but they’re also modeling method and history teachers, whether they’re in the high school classroom or the college classroom, are doing both. We’re attentive to content, but we are not content delivery vehicles. We are trying to understand new scholarship through the lens of the historical method. And so each module offers content, but it also filters it through the historical method, so that a teacher can both, you know, wrap a lesson around that, but model that for students.

Daniel Story
I think that’s really important, Laura, and I wonder if you would unpack that ever so slightly more. What do we mean when we talk about historical method?

Laura McEnaney
Well, I think it goes back to what I said about it begins with a question, and one of the hardest things for us to frame is a question. And I taught historical methods for 25 years, and it was one of the hardest parts of the assignments for students is to ask a framing question, but to ask a question that was small enough to get to something bigger. And when we asked each scholar to do this, it was interesting that Mark and I and this was really enjoyable part of this was to shape the questions, polish the questions, with the scholars themselves. They came up with beautiful questions. But there was a dialogue quite often about, how can I sharpen this? How can I use language that is understandable, and how can this question then lead to documents? The documents are in the modules, but in general, documents don’t answer questions. They require us to ask new ones, new how, new why, new where, new when? But documents rarely have any kind of answer, but they are generative of new questions, new breadcrumb trails to new puzzles. And so the historical method is really about following the question into the archive, deeply into the document. It’s time travel to get into that case study and then to come out again, back to your moment and say, here’s what I saw. Here’s what I want to offer as a tentative hypothesis, and here’s what I’m still wondering.

Mark Bradley
Yeah, I think the other part of that is we wanted to encourage contributors to be thinking as expansively as possible about what the primary text would be. And so there really is a remarkable range of sources, and we hope that’s going to be another way, in a teacher or a group of students may see a particular kind of source and feel an affinity with that that lets them get into it in a way that another source might not right. So we have plenty of what I guess one would say are more traditional textual kinds of sources. You know. McCarthy’s famous wheeling Virginia speech is there, there are some court transcripts, there are letters, there are petitions to Kings, you know, this sort of thing. But there really is an interesting array of non textual sources that people have gone to. Sometimes they’re just out and out visual sources. You know, some listeners may be familiar with Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator film, and there’s that scene where Chaplin’s on the desk and he’s kind of dancing with an inflatable globe. So we have a contributor, Scott Spector, who’s at University of Michigan. He’s trying to think a little bit about satire, you know, in the ways in which satire works, we also actually wanted to make sure that contributors were not necessarily all full professors, or even professors at all yet. And so we have a couple of doctoral students who are involved in the project. They both have, you know, just super interesting sources. One textual, but it’s this notion, apparently, back in the late 19th century, early 20th century, this is a student who works on Indigenous histories in the United States, that the Federal officers who were working in Indian affairs were often colloquially called little dictators by indigenous peoples. And so she’s got a set of petitions and then responses from quote, the little dictators, back and forth to be able to kind of unpack and see some of that. Another doctoral student is working with this really interesting interactive web documentary that’s graphic, and it’s thinking about how it is that throughout the course of the World War Two period, a Polish man, young boy really eventually finds himself in the Middle East and then finally in India. And so trying to talk about where immigration and the transnational movement of peoples are in authoritarian regimes around wartime. There are many more. But just again, to give a sense of the kind of richness of that, and to go back to what Laura is saying, that is historical method, different sorts of questions with texts and other kinds of sources, but in a sense, ultimately, you’re trying to reveal a set of things about the past that you didn’t know, and that those different sources can put you in spaces that allow you to do that.

Laura McEnaney
You know, I have to say it’s been such a joy as an Americanist to travel the globe and immerse myself in these episodes that the scholars are sharing, and a couple of them stand out to me. One is Jeff Wasserstrom’s unit on China in 89 in the student protest and the crackdown. And, you know, he asked this question, how do authoritarian governments discredit protest? Right? That’s a question about China in that moment, but that is a broader question, that is a global question. And he has this testimony from the ruling government that is basically saying, you think you saw this, but you actually saw this. You didn’t see student protesters, you saw rioters. And it speaks to something we’re tracking one of our themes, which is authoritarian practices. How do authoritarians do what they do? What are the mechanisms of authoritarian rule? And those are big and broad questions, and we can’t grapple with them unless we have something to grab onto, unless we have compelling stories, and historians are storytellers, but we ultimately end with a thesis statement, an argument, and again, an argument as part of a larger conversation about history. But I think Wasserstroms is interesting, particularly in this moment, because it’s an authoritarian government trying to deny a reality and tell a group of citizens this is what you’re seeing, not that. Another module, for me that was really compelling was Sam Daly’s module on authoritarianism in Africa, specifically Nigeria and he looks at the afro beat musician Fela Kuti, who was a critic of the Nigerian government and the military burns his house down, and there is a trial in air quotes, and the authoritarian government stages this trial. And you think, well, this isn’t going to go well, right? This is completely in the control and the messaging is in the control of the authoritarian government, the trial and the messaging about it. And yet, some of Fela’s partners, other musicians, other activists, used the trial to voice their view of what they think is happening. This is what I love about history, is it looks like the story is taking you in this direction, and indeed, part of that is true, but Sam’s module shows you that activists are using a trial to take things in a different direction. The trial actually makes space for their dissent in a way that the authoritarian government could not have predicted. So that is another example of a module that raises more questions, surprises you a bit and then forces you to grapple with Sam’s question, whose side is the law on in a case like this.

Mark Bradley
The other thing Daniel that I’ve really enjoyed reading and learning from are contributors who have taken more of a social history approach to in a sense, socializing, particularly younger people, into authoritarian norms, practices, ideas. And we have one, I think, particularly original contribution in that regard, Karl Qualls, who’s at a Dickinson College, has two board games, one that was developed in the Italian Fascist period 1930s and one in the Soviet Union. And the games are essentially, you know, board games that are socializing children in the Italian case really into fascist warfare. In the Soviet case into being kind of what it’s like to be good little stalinites. He’s annotated the boards and so, you know, students will be able to take a look, if it’s projected, up to sort of follow, what that game would look like. But the Soviet one has a kind of Chutes and Ladders quality to it, in a way. But again, thinking about at a very everyday sort of level, how these ideas influence people, even at a younger age. Is another contributor who’s working with Vichy Regime posters about sport and sport being one of the ways in which fascist for themes in the World War Two era were inculcating a certain set of values and really helping students unpack what one particular poster is doing in ways that you know when you first looked at it, you might not see it, but it’s a sort of guided set of questions that do that. And then we’ve got a lot of contributors who are really encouraging kind of projects out of this. So with the posters, you know, one option would be, could they imagine designing their own poster around some sort of authoritarian claim or issue? So sometimes the teaching is around, you know, it could be a kind of lecture, short lecture sort of thing to a group. It could be around kind of guided discussion, individual, one on one or group. But then people do have some quite innovative projects for people to think about as well

Daniel Story
That’s exciting. And there’s also, if I understand correctly, a number of different kind of mediums through which you’re getting this project out right, when we think of the AHR, we might think of, you know, the pages of the journal, or the digital analog to that, but there are some other interesting platforms and avenues that people can engage, right?

Mark Bradley
That’s right, the modules will all be what Oxford University Press likes to call free to read. So essentially, you click on it, and you don’t have to navigate a paywall. So it’s really easy for students to get there, and teachers. We’re in the process of developing a website dedicated to the project that we hope will make it even easier for for teachers to find us, to find the modules and to get a sense of the kind of work that they’re doing. In a sense, there’s three clusters of modules. There are a set of modules that are thinking about authoritarian practices in a historical perspective. There’s a set that we would call challenging authoritarianism, and then another set that really are rooted in the visual. But you know, as we’ve already said, take people into all kinds of different directions with the visual. So on the website, we’re trying to do some big and small curations for people about how to find things. There’s this very cool map that the web designers have put together. You hover over it, it gets you the ones from that region. It takes you right there. So there’ll be a lot of portals in that space for people to be working with. And that’s probably, I think, the primary way that most teachers will get in in the end, and we’ll be launching that roughly at the same time that the first module will start to appear in the journal, so at some point in March.

Daniel Story
Yeah, there are also videos, right? Do you want to talk about those Laura?

Laura McEnaney
Sure, when you know one of the things that we thought about is how to connect the module with the scholar, and for the students to hear the scholar’s voice and to see them, because it it connects them with the author in a way that has them paying more attention. And so we’ve made these these videos, and each scholar has narrated their module, has introduced the core question, offered the context and some of the teaching plans. And one of the things that strikes me is watching historians do their craft live, students will have a chance not just to read the module, but to watch the scholar teacher become the teacher scholar, because we’ve asked all of these scholars to speak in their teaching voice and to translate that scholarship into a conversation that one can have in a classroom. And so to watch the scholars do that is compelling in its own way. The other thing you notice is, getting back to your question about the historical method, you see tone. You can hear it too in in the podcast. You can see it in the video. At the core of the discipline, this is something I’m quoting from the historian of Germany, George Mosse. At the core of the discipline is empathy. Empathy has to proceed understanding and judgment. It doesn’t mean historians don’t render judgments, but they have to look at some of the hardest episodes, some of the ugliest episodes, and grapple with that. And as you watch the videos or listen to the podcasts, you can hear historians tone of curiosity, and that tone of curiosity is conveying empathy. It’s conveying a method that is absolutely foundational to what we do, especially for a hard topic like authoritarianism.

Daniel Story
And I’ve also worked with my colleague Syrus Jin to produce a handful of brief podcast episodes that will be attached to specific modules that will be kind of in the eight to 10 minute range, and be specifically targeted at students with the idea that they could listen to that eight minute episode about that particular history and then really be ready to enter into a discussion or some other activity in the class.

Laura McEnaney
I’m excited about that because students are flooded with information. And, you know, having the podcast, for me, what’s important about this is the AHA in the AHR as trusted voices in an age of information abundance. What is trust? How do you trust? And the AHR is the flagship journal in the field. The podcast is connected to that. It’s the conversation about what’s in the journal and beyond, and it’s important for teachers and students to know that they can trust us, because there is a method, there is a process, there is peer review, there are multiple voices that produce anything we put out there, and teachers can be overwhelmed by what I said earlier, just this decentralized abundance and what comes with the AHR, the journal and the podcast, is trust, a trusted anchor, a trusted source of information that this new knowledge and these teaching techniques have been vetted, And we offer them humbly to you, but you can trust that they’ve been produced with quality.

Mark Bradley
But I’m so glad that you’re able to do the interviews too, because I think also, you know, these are three dimensional people, right? And you’ve got a really nice, I mean, for listeners, range of places, Laura was mentioning Jeff Wasserstrom, who’s got the sort of Tiananmen era China one, but you’ve got Cuba under Castro, you’ve got early 2000s elections in Egypt, and then a McCarthy speech. So again, a really nice sort of geographical range. I think that’ll be interesting for listeners to hear. Yeah. The other thing, I think that’s, you know, helps is every module, we asked contributors to give three very short texts, visuals, whatever that they thought might help anchor a teacher more into the context, and we very specifically made sure that those were short and that there was some annotation with each of them so the teacher realized, okay, if I’m looking at that chapter or I’m looking at these pages, this is where it’s going to take me this is where I can go. That’s all bundled into the module so that those extra things are right there for people. So in addition to the podcast and to the visual interviews, everybody will be able to kind of offer that sort of support. And it goes in those same kind of directions that Laura is saying, you know, if you’re trying to build this larger sense of empathy and understanding, it’s giving you some other pieces to do that as well. The other thing that we’re hoping, and, you know, I don’t know you can be kind of sort of utopian about these projects, I think, in a way. But, you know, the primary audience for us again, high school, college, university teachers. But it occurred to us that people could use them in different kinds of spaces as well. You know, if you’ve got a history club in your department, you might want to think, you know a little bit about authoritarianism, and this could give people a way to do that. Maybe it’s a doctoral workshop that’s thinking in these kinds of lines. This would give them a way to think of that. For doctoral students in particular, we asked every single contributor to give us what they think is the most important book on the history of authoritarianism that’s ever been published. So we’ve got 30 of those. They’re annotated as well. So again, for a kind of doctoral audience, it might be that part of the site that would start and open a reading list, but even beyond the academy, you know, a book club at a public library or a discussion group at a public library. I think the hope is that these would be open enough that people would be able to think about them in that kind of context, and the website will give, we hope, some helpful thoughts about, you know, how people might put together some of those sort of outside the classroom ways of engaging.

Laura McEnaney
And that’s a really important point that that Mark is raising about where these kinds of conversations and where this learning can happen because the AHA slogan, everything has a history connected to that is every space can be a history classroom. And we think that the modules, the videos, the podcast, as sort of an assembly of resources, can enable students to take the learning a little further, to direct their own questions, to follow their curiosity backwards into the past, forwards into the present. We let them be the driver. But if we believe that everything has a history, we have to think hard about where are our history classrooms, especially in this moment.

Daniel Story
I sort of agree with that.

Mark Bradley
I want to say, Daniel, you know, to put this project in a broader perspective, you know, you open with the question of, you know, why this moment thinking about authoritarianism and its histories, which is a key question. But the fact that we even have the capability to approach this at the AHR in teaching terms, rather than necessarily in more traditional research terms is about a kind of fundamental transformation in the journal over the last five years, we made a conscious decision that we were going to find a space for teaching in the journal. We were not going to say that, you know, fewer articles, more teaching, but it was going to be, you know, a sort of adding in again, rather than competing with what we were doing, and we didn’t know, in a way, how that would go, it was pandemic times. We had all these focus groups. We were talking to people. Laura was involved in all of these things. We talked to high school teachers, liberal arts, college people, community college people, university people, what would they like to see? Tried to figure out, you know, something that became the hashtag AHR syllabus project, and so that’s really what gave us the traction to do this. We just got some data from Oxford University Press. They’re our publisher, and they give us some data about readership. You know, what’s getting downloaded. And interestingly enough, many of the projects that have been part of the syllabus project are the top downloads over the last couple of years. So I think they’re landing with our readership and our membership and so, you know, we hope again to be kind of piggybacking on that kind of enthusiasm. I should also say that Laura has graciously stepped in to serve as our consulting editor for hashtag AHR syllabus project, and so once we get this launched, Laura is going to be taking forward the kind of next generation of syllabus projects for that as well.

Daniel Story
That’s really exciting. We’re lucky to have you working on this with the AHR, Laura,

Mark Bradley
We are super lucky.

Laura McEnaney
Thank you.

Daniel Story
Yeah. Well, Mark, Laura, it’s been really great to talk to the two of you about this project. And you know, I, for one, really look forward to seeing what impact it has as it, you know, gets out into the world in front of teachers and students.

Laura McEnaney
Thank you, Daniel. We’re really grateful to be able to talk with folks about this project.

Mark Bradley
Yeah, to both you and to Syrus, you know, one of the things about the project has been it’s time sensitive. You know, it feels like it needed to get out much, much faster than at least the timetable of academic journals, you know works, but that also meant that, you know, you had a vision of kind of how the podcast was going to work over the course of the year, and you’ve been very generous about making some time to insert this into it and I appreciate that.

Daniel Story
Yeah, very happy to do that. Yeah, yeah.

That was my conversation with Mark Bradley and Laura McEnaney about the AHR’s new project “Authoritarianism 101.” The first six A101 modules will be available in the March 2026 issue. And look out in April for the launch of the project’s website, which you’ll find at historians.org/a101. That site will include the modules as well as short videos and podcast episodes related to specific modules.

History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by me, Daniel Story.

That’s it for now. See you next time.