History and Video Games + Digital Submission Guidelines

Daniel Story

Welcome to History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. In this episode we introduce the AHR’s recently released Digital Media submission guidelines through a conversation with board of editors member Kalani Craig who was instrumental it putting them together. But first, we’re talking history and video games—specifically, the wildly popular video game Red Dead Redemption. Teaching American History through this pop culture lens is the focus of historian Tore Olsson’s December contribution to the #AHRSyllabusProject.

History in Focus producer Conor Howard spoke with Olsson about his experience developing a course focused around Red Dead Redemption. This is episode 2.4 for December 2023. Thanks for joining us.

 

From Red Dead Redemption 2 Trailer

We’re a long way east of land we know. Far from real open country.

 

Conor Howard

For anyone who has played Red Dead Redemption 2 those few seconds of moonlight and Arthur Morgan’s voice probably stood out to you right away. For anyone else, Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the most successful video games of the past several years. It is set in a fictionalized post-Civil War United States, and the game presents players with a fascinating and thought-provoking cross-section of American history. Still, it is probably fair to say that it is a long way from “land we know” to use a fictional work like this to teach real-world history. A few weeks ago, I was able to discuss this topic with Tore Olsson of the University of Tennessee whose AHR syllabus piece titled “Violence, Power, and American History in Video Games” will be available to read in the December 2023 issue of the American Historical Review.

 

Tore Olsson

My name is Tore Olsson and I am an Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, focusing on the United States since the Civil War. For most of my career, I’ve been a rather academic traditional historian writing for you know, scholarly readers. In the early days of the pandemic during lockdown, I decided to return to a hobby that had once upon a time, many decades previous, dominated my life, which was video games. So early in the pandemic, I play this game, Red Dead Redemption 2, and I dive into it. And you know, I mean, on one hand, I was shocked just because the game looks so much better than games I played 20 years ago, a revolution in terms of the audiovisual experience. But it wasn’t just that, it was the maturity and the complexity and the thoughtfulness—at times, I mean, this games got lots of violence and problems in it that, you know, I’m not going to make any apologies or defenses of—but overall, like, as a piece of, you know, historical recreation, it was not totally stupid. It was surprisingly nuanced, at times, and quite, quite interesting, given the audience.

The audience for this game is just so massive, right? I mean, more than 50 million people have purchased this game, and I’d say, at least 100 million people have played it. So this is like the Oregon Trail of the next generation.

 

Conor Howard

Yeah, I mean, Oregon Trail has been the gold standard. Could you even just say a word on the world of difference between the Oregon Trail experience and the Red Dead experience?

 

Tore Olsson

Yeah absolutely. Right. So just obviously, looking at the game, it’s much more sophisticated visually. But another big difference between this game, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Oregon Trail is that Oregon Trail was, you know, despite this mentioning as the kind of gold standard, was really problematic in terms of historical perspectives. Red Dead Redemption 2—this is not a game about sort of, you know, brave white men, quote, unquote, winning the West. It’s a really sort of jaded, bitter, critical view of any sort of triumphal narrative in American history. I mean, it’s a game that’s deeply critical of corporate capitalism, despite the fact that it’s made by a huge corporation, Rockstar Games, but it’s one that really addresses questions of racism and exclusion, sometimes in a sustained manner. It is a really diverse world, even if yes, the main actor is white. But so yeah, so it’s different from Oregon Trail in all sorts of ways, right, not just as a video game, but as a recreation of history. I think it’s a, if, you know, if this is the Oregon Trail of the next generation, we’ve actually moved ahead rather than gone backwards, which is good.

 

Conor Howard

That is wonderful to hear. The traditional gaming demographic is teens and twentysomething white men. Building a class around this caters to the interests of that group. So I guess I’d like to hear a bit about how you kind of bring in a wider audience, how you maybe market this class to a wider audience. And I guess issues of gatekeeping can come up, right? Where if you have this 75% of the class are the core demographic that this game was designed for, as also the the large demographic in your course?

 

Tore Olsson

Yeah, that’s, that’s a great question, right? I mean, we have to address these bigger demographic, and indeed, philosophical issues regarding you know, teaching and writing and who our audience is.

So when I was a gamer the first time around, back in the 90s, I mean, this stereotype of the teens and 20s disaffected alienated white male gamer—that was kind of true. But when I checked back in, I learned quickly that the demographic had changed a great deal. I mean, yes, sure, there’s still a lot of young white men involved in gaming, but there were many many other people who’d come around to it. Before I taught the class I began reading up on who’s actually playing video games, and I was stunned at the statistics, right? About 65% of Americans play an hour of video games or more a week, right? I mean, there’s a lot of young white men in America, but they ain’t 65% of the country, right? So, clearly, there’s a lot of other folks who are engaged in the video game world. And as a result, game developers are crafting games that are going to speak to perspectives other than that, of this, you know, kind of very narrow, original audience of gaming.

But so when I taught the class, right, so I’ve taught the class twice, and I should acknowledge, you know, the University of Tennessee is an overwhelmingly white institution, which is going to shape a lot of what happens in the class. And yeah, it is true that white men are the largest demographic group, right, I’d say that compose about 65-70% of the class. The real, the real kind of moving parts here, the real variable is gender. The university is 55%, female, the history major is majority female, and most of my traditional classes, like when I teach classes on food history, and US and Mexican history, they’re generally about 55% or 60% females, right? So you basically flip that when doing this class, because a lot of guys sign up for it, right? But the question is, how can I keep this from becoming, you know, just like a bro fest? So one way is that I do not require any students to have played the game, knowledge of the game is solely for their, for spurring their enthusiasm for the class, and this actually played out in this way that many of the female students in the class have heard about the game but haven’t played it. In that sense, I’ve been able to serve a lot of students who are not necessarily gamers. And you know, when I first started the class, I was expecting about 90% of the people to come in the door on day one and be like, yeah, I know this game intimately. But that actually hasn’t been the case. I mean, I’d say about 50%, have played it closely, another 20%, you know, have at least seen a friend play it. But then a good like 30% of the class really doesn’t know anything about the game. But they’re just curious, because this is an, you know, unique way to approach history, and they’re interested in pop culture. I mean, I’ve felt a fair deal of, you know, maybe anxiety or discomfort about the sort of, you know, gender balance in my class. But what’s kind of helped me sleep well at night, is the obvious fact that, obvious to me at least, that the one demographic that needs to grapple most with questions of inequality, race, gender, class, capitalism, whatnot, in American history, are white men. And I’ve found that you know, if you use this kind of hook, you can get people in the door, get butts in seats, and then bring them along for a ride that they could never have expected. And so it’s fun. It’s extra fun to kind of see some of those, you know, gamer guys who come in are just like, blown away by wow I just had no idea that, you know, lynching look this way, for example.

 

Conor Howard

Right, and then that’s just a powerful social impact there for this course. So I want to talk about this issue of butts in seats and sort of the durability of a course like this. On the one hand, how has university administration or department administration responded to this idea? And I mean, even though we can’t call video games ephemera anymore, how might this in some way run up against a time crunch?

 

Tore Olsson

Yeah, those are, those are two really great, interrelated questions. So about the response, you know, about 30/40 hours into my first playthrough of Red Dead Redemption 2, that was when this epiphany hit me, right, and I pitched it to my department leadership and their response was unfailingly positive. They were, neither the associate head or the head knew anything about video games. But they knew that, you know, I had done kind of creative, unusual classes before, and I promised them two things: it’s going to be a serious class, and that it was, it was going to get student enrollments, right? So they were eager to see me try this. But the real trick and getting the actual butts in seats was promotion through social media. This is also during the pandemic, so it was harder to put up fliers on campus, a lot of things were still being done on Zoom. And so I took to Twitter and Reddit, and it was really effective for getting word out—not just in the larger kind of gaming community, but among University of Tennessee undergraduates. So I was able to translate that kind of enthusiasm on the social media campaign into actual enrollments during enrollment week. And in fact, we had to double the capacity of that first class and then we kind of had to slam the door shut, because I couldn’t find another TA to to help me with the grading. So this gets to your second question about the kind of longevity and durability of any video game in kind of pop culture memory. So when I institutionalized this class, meaning when I had it added to the catalog, I did not file for Red Dead America. I file for a class called “American History in Video Games”, and so that this would be a kind of broader category where I could swap out the games and the content as time goes on. Pop culture memories are brief, right? And you know, when you’re teaching with pop culture, you have to be able to pivot on your toes a little bit and you know, kind of be quick on the turnaround and figure out when something goes stale, and when do you need to replace it?

 

Conor Howard

Yeah, and maybe now’s a good time to kind of discuss like, this is a new type of material to be doing this with, but it’s not entirely a new concept, right? I think, like 10/8 years ago, it seemed like every department had a class that was centering around Hamilton, right?

 

Tore Olsson

Yeah, historians have been using pop culture for as long as we’ve been teaching, right? Books, films, TV shows. It’s just, it’s time we take video games seriously as another dominant form of pop culture, right, we cannot isolate it from the rest of the kind of, you know, public media world. And if we don’t, you know, if we, as historians don’t talk about it, then others are going to provide the kind of context and explanation to fill out the games, and we’re going to do a better job.

 

Conor Howard

The one other thing that we wanted to talk about is you have an upcoming book release, right?

 

Tore Olsson

Yeah so when I finished the very first semester’s version of this class, it was such a blast, right? It was such an unusual semester, the students were more engaged than I’d ever seen before.

And I’ve done a tremendous amount of work to put together lecture and discussion content based on this class. And I was really curious whether there would be an audience outside of the University of Tennessee for this kind of history. So I began thinking, you know, like, might it be possible to put together a book and pitch it to a non-academic audience? When I publicized my original class on social media, there were a lot of responses from people way outside of Knoxville, Tennessee. That inspired me to think that, you know, maybe there’s people out there who want to read about this. And like many of my fellow historians, I’m really interested in getting serious history into the hands of people who probably wouldn’t pick it up otherwise.

And so last summer, I signed a contract with St. Martin’s Press, Macmillan. It’s coming out in the summer of 2024. So a little while away still, but it is a profoundly public-facing book that’s aimed, you know, the sort of pitch of it is very similar to the class right? Like, hey, if you love these games, and you’re curious about how they can make, the games can make you a, you know, more thoughtful citizen and person, then pick up this book.

 

Conor Howard

Wonderful. And what was the title?

 

Tore Olsson

“Red Dead’s History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America’s Violent Past” out in August 2024.

 

Conor Howard

So I guess maybe we want to close on a final word for the concerned parent who sees that their son or daughter is taking a video game history course.

 

Tore Olsson

Yeah, exactly. It’s not just a rehashing of the plot of this game. It is an attempt to take a fictional pop culture product and use the energy and curiosity that they’ve instilled in so many millions of people and use it as a vehicle for getting at some of the thorniest topics in American history. So, the parents, just as the students will be very surprised to know by the end of the semester that this was hardly a video game class, but instead a history class with a video game sort of flavor to it.

 

Daniel Story

That was Conor Howard in conversation with Tore Olsson whose contribution to the #AHRSyllabusProject appears in the December 2023 issue of the AHR. Up next, my conversation with Kalani Craig about the AHR’s new Digital Media submission guidelines.

For a while now, the AHR has published pieces that could be described as digital history in one form or another. But with recently released guidelines for these types of submissions, the journal hopes to make them a more frequent occurrence by offering a set of practical considerations that scholars can utilize as they consider submitting digitally focused pieces.

You can access these Digital Media Submissions guidelines right now at americanhistoricalreview.org under How To Submit. You’ll find a brief introduction to the guidelines there, and three individual tracks broken down by time-based media (think audio and video), interactive argumentation (such as big data visualizations), and visual argumentation (such as graphic articles).

So as a small window into what these guidelines encompass and the dynamics that brought them about, I spoke with someone who has long been a mentor of mine around all things digital history and who also happened to be a critical voice in shaping these guidelines for the journal. I’m talking current AHR board of editors member, Kalani Craig. Kalani also spoke about the guidelines with AHR editor Mark Bradley, and an edited version of that conversation, which we reference in our talk, appears in the December 2023 issue of the AHR.

 

Daniel Story

Well, I feel like a good place to start is with the question of what—what are we talking about? What are these new digital media submission guidelines? How would you explain this Kalani?

 

Kalani Craig

The really short version is that the AHR has a new set of submission guidelines that roll standard articles, time-based media like podcasts and documentaries, digital history endeavors, and public history endeavors that have embedded visualizations or interactive pieces, and visual argumentation, like infographics or graphic novels, all into a single unified set of guidelines. The longer version is that that’s a pretty exciting document, even though it’s a very boring set of bullet point lists of things you have to submit, because it puts all of the different forms of historical argumentation on the same page, quite literally. That’s really cool.

 

Daniel Story

It is really cool. It’s very exciting. So, you know, we can tackle this in a few different ways, I think. But one thing that is really intriguing to me are the different sorts of things we’re trying to balance against each other with these submission guidelines. And, you know, the conversation between you and Mark, that’s gonna be printed in the December issue talks a lot about balancing production needs of the journal—needs/what, you know, what’s possible, right? all the different moving parts of the production side of things—and then the workflow of the scholar who, in working in these different types of mediums are, that workflow can, can be, you know, pretty dynamic, let’s say, right? So how are we trying to balance those things out?

 

Kalani Craig

I think I would start with the last bullet point in some of the non-print media forms. So if you go look at the interactive embedded scholarship piece, the one of the last forms is talk about why this is, in labor terms, the rough equivalent of an argumentative article that’s 8000 words, that’s the standard we’re used to in the AHR. I think it starts there. That’s where the balance came in. Because when we look at how scholarship in time-based media, or digital media, or drawn, or infographic-style media has been produced by historians in the past, one of the questions is, do we then also have to write about it?

 

Daniel Story

Right, essentially double the work?

 

Kalani Craig

Yeah, exactly, it doubles the work. So how do we acknowledge that there are different ways to express a historical argument or a historical project, without asking people who aren’t rooting their scholarship in 8000-word articles, or monographs, to produce work that still functions as an argument and that puts them in an even playing field with folks doing traditional written scholarship? And that’s where I think the Digital History Working Group, and not just the Digital History Working Group at the AHA, but pretty much anyone doing digital scholarship has railed about this as a point of equity for a really long time. Like the first time I remember hearing somebody talk about labor in digital history was maybe 2011, 2010 or 2011. And not asking people to do double the work, especially in an environment where we’ve got a good chunk of the profession off the tenure line, and pressure on the tenure line to go faster, do more in a budget-crunched environment, we have to really be mindful of the fact that people are producing the scholarship—not automatons. So I think it really started in terms of balancing things from there. And then what we started to look at was how to balance the production labor too, because the AHR staff also needs time and expertise and skills to handle some of these newer forms. And not just these new forms, but to be able to accommodate the changing landscape of what historical argumentation looks like in the future. How do we build guidelines that let people do new things without having to build a whole new set of guidelines so that that labor that’s involved in talking about what history is, is also somewhat diminished because we’ve maybe already done it in a way that makes sense moving forward?

 

Daniel Story

Right, yeah, and in case it’s not already clear, the spirit behind these guidelines is to create an avenue for this kind of digital scholarship that is, I think Mark uses the word co-equal with an AHR article, right? We’re not trying to sequester these in some kind of appendix or something. These are meant to be submissions that should be held to the same standards, but also carry the same weight, right? As a traditional AHR article.

 

Kalani Craig

Yeah, synthetic or integrative. How do we combine all of these things into a venue that acknowledges the breadth of the profession, the skill set the profession has in it, what we might become in 10 years? That’s all really generous thinking, too. I think that’s one of the things that I came out of the drafting of the guidelines specifically with—was the sense of the generosity that Mark has approached his editorial work with, the ways that different kinds of scholarly media need different interventions at different points in time, that’s also really a generous way of thinking about scholarship. Right? It’s not like you produce a podcast, and then the podcast goes through the same exact peer review process that an article goes through because produced podcasts take a different form and have different kinds of production needs, different kinds of production times, different kinds of production labor. So these guidelines are not just about co-equal in terms of where the scholarship appears, although I think that was a key piece of it, they’re also more equitable in terms of how the scholarship can be peer-reviewed, and where the peer review needs to take place in the process of that particular scholars process as an academic.

 

Daniel Story

Right, that’s really interesting. Yeah, I like that we’re building in that kind of flexibility. I note, even in the submission guidelines themselves, there’s either overt or implied reference to the idea of being in conversation with AHR editorial staff through the submission process—which happens anyway with articles to a degree, but especially here—kind of allowing for some degree of give and take and flexibility and learning from each other, I suppose is how this is gonna play out as submissions come in?

 

Kalani Craig

Yeah, I think the impulse there is the collaborative impulse that is a big part of you know, and here I’m drawing on my specific experience, my world as a digital historian is almost entirely collaborative projects. And so, what you’re seeing there isn’t just my voice, it’s because I’m the one who did the initial, like, let’s draft out these bullet points, and then see how other people respond. That’s not just my voice in forming that first draft, it’s thinking about all the conversations that I’ve ever had with you, or with Arlene Diaz, or with the team at the Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities, or with Jeff McClurken who leads the Digital History Working Group, that list is probably 65 people long. And I could sort of feel some of the impulses of those other voices in my head, as I started to think about what it means to talk to someone else about the form something is going to take eventually, how to vet it as part of a conversation.

That’s what we do anyway, right? We’re historians, we talk to each other, we talk to each other in historiographic arenas that vary by field and subfield. And for digital history, particularly, that historiographic conversation is a collaborative one that often happens as we’re hashing out the specific details of a project and the direction it takes.

 

Daniel Story

Yeah, okay. So let’s see, well, I don’t want to dive too deeply into the mechanics of this submission guidelines, as people can read those, but there may be a few other areas that might be worth mentioning here. One thing that comes to my mind is references to, again, the sort of like hashing out through the process, how, let’s take, for example, like interactive visualizations might ultimately be presented, what form would they take? Where would they live on the web? as it were? And if there’s, and there probably is, data behind those interactive visualizations, where does that data live, and how is it kind of preserved? What are we saying about those kinds of questions?

 

Kalani Craig

So I think there’s actually a really linear answer to that and it starts with sustainability. The big question behind all of those impulses is, what does this look like for someone engaging with an AHR scholarly publication, I’m very carefully not saying article, in 20 years, in 50 years, in 100 years? That’s part of the impulse as a historian that’s part of an impulse as someone who does digital community archiving and public history work. And that’s also an impulse that is not solely a digital history impulse, the thought process that data is part of the scholarly output. That’s also something that’s happening on the national scale, the NSF requires its fundies to publish their datasets in an open source accessible, sustainable location like a library repository. And then the goal is there for how do we as historians think about that as part of our process. From that impulse comes publish the data, the data is essentially provided that, you know, we’re thinking about it carefully, an open source, comma-separated values file or a text file, that can be preserved indefinitely. So that whatever the embedded interactive visualization looks like, the data is still there for that embedded visualization to be recreated in whatever new software is out there. What we’re trying to acknowledge is that the software world changes rapidly, but the data itself does not. In terms of the interactive embedded visualization then, the impulse to sustainability to preservation to accessibility in 10 years or 15 years, with the author’s intent in mind, is also part of that conversation. But we have some answers to that because we’ve thought from the ground up about where the data lives and what that data is supposed to do for future generations. And the answer is, then, here’s the embedded visualization, we need to think about where it lives, depending on what kinds of environmental needs it has, and I’m gonna get nerdy here, is it in a no JS environment? Or is it something that’s more static? If you’re embedding something that’s more static, then it lives at Oxford University Press with its data. If it’s something that’s less static and requires a specialized environment, then what we also want to do is have the conversation with the author and the editorial board about making sure there’s a video of the scholar interacting with that embedded visualization, so that their impulses as a scholar, the way that they use that interactive visualization to get to their argument to express their argument, those are recorded in a format that is more stable than the visualization itself. But then the visualizations can still become part of what informs the conversation now. So there’s that timeline again, like what are we talking about in argumentative terms about the past? How is the current history of graphic conversation being shaped by things that are happening now? And how to preserve parts of that conversation that are going to have the most impact for historians in the future?

 

Daniel Story

Terrific.

 

Kalani Craig

Literally speechless.

 

Daniel Story

Yeah. No, I think that’s great, and, you know, as you’ve already kind of mentioned in this conversation, that kind of approach and the wisdom in that approach is drawn from now many years of your own work in digital history, and the community that exists around digital history in digital humanities who has been thinking about these things for a long time? Righ?.

 

Kalani Craig

Yeah, I mean, I think that the best way to think about it is to borrow a science fiction term, which is that these guidelines really are the product of a hive mind. There are so many different voices in there, so many different people’s needs, so many different kinds of addressing feelings of exclusion. And also not just the negative, addressing the potential, the promises that many people have talked about, and making those promises real, reifying them in something that is a practical document that will let people do the kind of work that they want to do that is really meaningful, both for historians and for public audiences, that expands the access the profession has to different audiences without changing what our real values are, which is representing change over time in the past, honestly, and with good evidence. And that’s really a credit to the kinds of conversations that other people have prompted and had without me in them and with me in them over the course of the last 10 or 15 years, there’s again, 65 or 70, people I can think of, you know, just which I won’t name them all, because that would be a podcast too long, the peer reviewer would reject it. But I think it’s really valuable to think about this document as the product of so many conversations because that’s what made it feasible and possible to incorporate and synthesize so many different kinds of approaches to the scholarly conversation to what historians have done. So it’s a little weird to be the only person on the other side of the podcast because of it, you know, it feels like there should be like an auditorium behind me.

 

Daniel Story

That’s fair. And I think, yeah, we understand where you’re coming from. But I think there’s also a lot of us out here who are more than happy to have you Kalani as the sort of face and voice of this.

 

Kalani Craig

Oh, that’s funny. I’m glad to be that face and voice and also, I think more interested in making sure that there are other voices in the conversation too, because it doesn’t work when it’s just one person. Right? I have some really specific concerns about what digital history is that only apply to me, quite literally. And so I think that’s where again, I think I’ll go back to Mark’s very generous approach to the way that he edits the AHR, which is to have conversations with all of us. I know I’m not the only member of the Board of Editors who has had conversations with Mark that later, I see in what’s in the journal and in a way that is constitutive of his incorporation of other people’s opinions on a broad scale. And I think that’s a really nice place to situate these guidelines

 

Daniel Story

Well I like how in, again, in the piece that will appear in the editor’s notes, I think in the December issue, there’s a reference to how this is contextualized in some of the other changes that have happened at the journal in recent years, including History Lab, which is all about, you know, collaboration and experimentation, right? And ongoing conversation and being flexible to new approaches, trying things, trying, again, learning from mistakes, to also make a reference to a special issue that’s coming up. So I think this is like you’re saying, this is kind of all of a piece and it’s all, it all kind of makes sense together in this moment for the AHR. And that’s really exciting.

 

Kalani Craig

Absolutely. The only way to learn new things is to push buttons and break stuff in a thoughtful way. And to go find the experts when you’ve broken it too far for it to be fixed by you alone. I think that it’s hard to do that in history, especially because we are so careful about our work.

And I think that impulse to careful scholarship is important, but there also needs to be room for mistakes. And I really do like that mistakes issue is coming out shortly. Because it is a great frame for some of the things that I think are likely to happen with some of these early submissions. We won’t have solutions for everything right off the bat, but that’s a really good way to start, at least right, we have now something to work from. And I expect that there will be some changes to these guidelines as we work out the kinks and as we figure out what we need to say to make them more useful and to offer up more room for questions and conversation.

 

Daniel Story

Right, yeah. And maybe hopefully, some people who are listening to this conversation will be some of the ones who will help us push buttons and break things.

 

Kalani Craig

I very much hope so. Yes.

 

Daniel Story

And do some really cool work in the process, I’m sure, but also get the ball rolling and help us start that, that learning process.

 

Kalani Craig

Yeah, I think that there is a lot of room for people to submit stuff. There was room before but now I think really this opens up the doors wide. I’m not sure entirely what else we need to do to encourage people to walk through those doors other than say, email us, send us notes. And you know, that’s really where we’re at now is that the doors are flung open wide. And now we just have to walk through them.

 

Daniel Story

Yup, alrighty. Come on.

 

Kalani Craig

Cool.

 

Daniel Story

That was my conversation with Kalani Craig on the AHR’s new Digital Media Submission guidelines. You can find those guidelines at americanhistoricalreview.org under How to Submit. You can read Kalani’s conversation with Mark Bradley in the December 2023 issue of the AHR.

Early we heard Conor Howard’s conversation with Tore Olsson about his December issue contribution to the #AHRSyllabusProject on developing a history course around the video game Red Dead Redemption.

And while we’re at it, on the topic of digital media, if you happen to be attending this year’s AHA Annual Meeting in San Francisco, look out for the number of digital history focused sessions, including the Digital Project Showcase and Digital Drop-In Session on Friday afternoon. And if you’d like to ask questions or workshop a particular AHR submission idea, we’d love to see you at the American Historical Review Drop-In Session on Friday morning.

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 Conor Howard and me, Daniel Story. Audio engineering and transcription support was by Phoebe Rettberg. You can find out more about this and other episodes at americanhistoricalreview.org.

That’s it for now. See you next time.