State of the Field for Busy Teachers: African History

Daniel Story
Welcome to History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. I’m Daniel Story, and I’m very happy to be kicking off season 4 of the show. We have some great episodes lined up this season, including a look at the History Unclassified special issue “Mistakes I Have Made,” a teaching resource AHR is putting together on the history of totalitarianism, a conversation with AHA’s new executive director Sarah Weicksel, and, of course, something on the upcoming 250th anniversary of the signing of the United States’ declaration of independence. Now, it perhaps goes without saying, these are heavy, challenging times we’re living in, and we’re glad you’re spending at least some of your time here with us, thinking about how to do history in a critical, honest way in a moment when those qualities are needed more than ever. And on that note, to kick things off this season, we have not one opening episode, but actually a miniseries we’re calling “State of the Field for Busy Teachers.” In four brief episodes, we cover the fields of African History, Native American History, LGBTQ+ History, and Graphic History with historians Jennifer Hart, Ned Blackhawk, Don Romesburg, and Walter Greason. The idea is that in fifteen minutes or so, a teacher—or really anyone crunched for time—can get a high quality but rapid review of one of these fields of scholarship complete with pointers on where to look to learn more. The idea for this series came out of a set of panels on these same topics at the 2025 AHA in New York. Those panels were great for attendees, and we thought maybe we could play a part in taking those sessions and making a version of them available more widely. So we hope you’ll find these helpful. And please do pass them on if you know others who you think might be interested. So let’s get right down to the first of these—a look at the field of African History with historian Jennifer Hart.

Jennifer Hart
I’m Jennifer Hart, and I’m a professor of African history and the chair of the History Department at Virginia Tech. And this is the state of the field for African history. Talking about the state of the field in African history is pretty impossible. On a number of levels. It’s impossible for anyone to do all of the work that we do is really complex, and there’s always lots of research going on, and trying to summarize that in 10 to 15 minutes is really challenging. But especially for African history, it’s really challenging because not a lot of people have a lot of baseline knowledge. Very few people get education in African history at the K through 12 level or even at the university-level. And even people who have PhDs don’t regularly read or learn anything or take courses in African history, which is a real shame, and something that we should start to correct, but that really makes it hard. So I think what’s most useful is for me to talk about where the field started, and, to some degree, where it is today, and to point to some resources so that people can learn more, because there’s just no way to cover it all. Africa is also the largest continent, one of the largest continents on the face of the earth, and it has the oldest human history, that’s the oldest human civilizations on the face of the earth, and is one of the most diverse, if not the most diverse, culturally and and racially and genetically and all kinds of things. And so it’s, it’s a highly complex place with a very rich history that makes it really hard to kind of bring together, and we’re often really kind of cautious about over generalizing about the continent as well, right? So one of the things that we talk about a lot are the stereotypes and assumptions that people have about Africa that inhibits their ability to engage with African history or to think about the continent in any way. It’s something that you always have to grapple with from the very, very beginning. If you don’t address the stereotypes and assumptions, you can’t actually get people to talk in really grounded and informed ways about anything. So one of those stereotypes and assumptions that’s huge is that Africa is a country, and so that’s, you know, over generalizations, or generalizations at all are things that we’re really cautious about. African history has long pushed the discipline, the broader discipline of history, methodologically. And it could do that because it insisted on exploring the history of the continent on its own terms. And the most prominent example of this is oral history, and the recognition of oral history as a legitimate historical source on its own, not just as an anecdote, as it was used kind of in the early 20th century, and that’s often under acknowledged in the broader field. What we’re really interested in is thinking about what happens when we ask historical questions in ways that center African experiences. So not just talking about African history as an extension of European or imperial history, but Africa is having a history on its own terms, and that is really connected to some of the founding kind of principles of the field, or some of the founding politics of the field and how it emerged in the 1950s as a professional study of African history. And that happened in response to two different things. One was a need to respond to this persistent belief that Africa had no history, and that’s kind of grounded in Imperial racism and ethnocentrism that still lingers today in many, many ways, again, some of those assumptions and stereotypes, right? And the second was the need to make a usable past for newly independent African leaders in African countries who were gaining their independence in the 1950s and 1960s and so both of these things kind of inform how the field was founded and how it developed over the last 70 years. And that’s led to some really, truly innovative research. And some of the things that have made the work so innovative has also been what makes it so difficult for non-experts to engage in. So the kinds of things that I see happening right now that I find really exciting involve historians of Africa who are taking insights that are generated by thinking from the experiences of Africans, African communities, to engage in broader historical debates. So not just having the conversation amongst ourselves, among people who have expert or kind of detailed knowledge, but really thinking about how we engage people who don’t have that knowledge, to think more broadly about what we mean by history, the kind of larger narratives that we tell, the structures of those narratives, the methods that we use, the concepts that we deploy, that often have not accounted for African experiences at all, and as a result, are inaccurate and certainly not universal or global. It’s happening a lot in a lot of my fields, my own fields, in the history of technology and urban history and mobility history, and I also happen to think those are some of the most exciting sub-fields right now. There’s also a lot more conversation about public history and digital history in new ways, and that’s both in museum and archive work, as well as digital humanities, or public digital humanities in particular, and various kinds of applied history. So we’re maybe more likely than the average person to be involved in policy conversations and asylum cases, and all kinds of things like that. But you know, a lot of the work that historians are doing right now is kind of challenging those fundamental assumptions and concepts that we use every day, like about really basic terms like modernity or mobility or technology, things that we take for granted and think we know what they mean. But actually we carry some really profoundly ethnocentric assumptions about those things, regardless of whether we study them or not, right? I mean, even people who study them carry those same assumptions often, and that is partially a result of the theories that we use that have not accounted for African experiences in constructing their theoretical models. And it’s also the theory itself, is the is the result of some of those assumptions operating in the first place, right? Or the ways that they operate. There’s a lot of really interesting conversations happening in associations at the AHA certainly, but I see it a lot happening in like the Society for the History of Technology, and in the Urban History Association and the Global Urban History Project and places like this, where people really are embracing what it means to incorporate African histories, thinking about how we encourage scholars from the continent to participate in those conversations and creating space, not just for pure representation, but to really challenge ourselves to think differently about what We do and how we do it. And I think that has enormous potential. I will say that people need to read the work and engage in the conversations, though, and that’s not I mean, Africanists certainly need to do that, but everybody else does too. So if we have panels, people have to show up, right and read. There’s too much analysis and too many theoretical concepts and frameworks that purport to be global and universal, but do not seriously engage African histories at all, and that’s just a problem. It’s a massive problem, right? It’s a big challenge. So expand the scope of your bibliographies, read more widely, think differently and challenge yourself, because it may well be that that’s where the innovation and the insight comes from, right thinking about things in different ways. If people are interested in learning more about that in concrete terms and getting a sort of overview, one of the best and most accessible texts that I use a lot is Jonathan Reynolds and Erik Gilbert’s “Africa in World History”. It’s a textbook, but it’s not written like a traditional textbook, so it’s a lot more user-friendly and accessible and not not as dry as textbooks are. John Reader also wrote a really great sort of summary of the history of Africa that’s very accessible, and there’s a whole lot of primary source resources and information about how to teach African history. Trevor Getz’s “A Primer on Teaching African History” is really great. He also has another collection called “African Voices in the Global Past,” or “of the Global Past,” that is really useful, and does both the kind of summary work as well as providing resources, primary sources, and discussion questions and exercises, and, you know, classroom exercise suggestions for teachers. His book “Abina and the Important Men” is also really extraordinary as an example of what it looks like to take primary sources and analyze them, informed by secondary sources and scholars working in the field to produce something that is easily accessible to students and can be used in the classroom. And so if you haven’t read “Abina and the Important Men,” which is a graphic novel, then I really recommend it, because it’s really exceptional. There’s a whole bunch of other oral history collections and collections of slave narratives and all kinds of primary source collections out there that are really useful, and the World History Association has been really great, led by Trevor Getz and Jonathan Reynolds over the last several years to push us to think differently about the way that we write world history and the role of Africans and other people in the Global South in that kind of larger narrative. So that’s another space if you’re thinking about incorporating African history into World History classrooms, which is probably where it’s most likely to happen for a K-12 teacher, then you know that’s a really great way to do that.

Daniel Story
That was Jennifer Hart on the state of the field of African History. You can learn more about this and other episodes—including other installments from the “state of the field for busy teachers” series—at historians.org/ahr. 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, with transcription support from Mallory Hutchings-Tryon. That’s it for now. See you next time.