The American Historical Association held the eighth annual Texas Conference on Introductory History Courses on Friday, September 16 and Saturday, September 17, 2022, in partnership with Texas A&M University-San Antonio. This two-day, statewide conference was for anyone who teaches college-level introductory history courses whether in high schools, community colleges, or four-year universities, and others with an interest in these courses.

The AHA extends its thanks to the TAMUSA Department of History, particularly department Chair William Bush, for hosting the conference.

Please direct any questions to Rachel Wheatley at rwheatley@historians.org.

Featured Speakers: 

Daniel Immerwahr (pronounced IM-mer-var, he/him pronouns) is a professor of history at Northwestern University, where he teaches global history and U.S. foreign relations. His first book, Thinking Small (Harvard 2015), a history of U.S. grassroots antipoverty strategies, won the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Award for best work of U.S. intellectual history. His second, How to Hide an Empire, a retelling of U.S. history with the overseas parts of the country included in the story, was a national bestseller and won the Robert Ferrell book prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Immerwahr is currently working on two research projects, one one the pop culture of U.S. global hegemony, the other a book about nineteenth-century urban catastrophes. Immerwahr's writings have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Slate, The Nation, and The New Republic.

Tina Marie Jackson, PhD, serves as the Assistant Commissioner of Workforce Education at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Prior to joining the Coordination Board in 2020, Jackson served as the District Director of Developmental Education at Collin College. In March 2019, Jackson's Developmental Education Program received the "2019 Promising Program Award" by the National Association of Developmental Education. In July 2018, Jackson was one of only 20 individuals across the United States selected for the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education (AABHE) Leadership and Mentoring Institute. Previously Jackson worked as the statewide coordinator of Community College Programs at The University of Texas at Austin for five years helping to redesign developmental math throughout all 50 community colleges in the state of Texas. Jackson also served as Associate Dean of Science Technology Engineering & Math (STEM) at Dallas County Community College District. Jackson holds a Bachelor of Science degree, a master's degree in Education from the University of Minnesota and a PhD in Educational Administration from The University of Texas at Austin.

Johann Neem is Professor of History at Western Washington University and editor of the Journal of the Early Republic. His book Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America (2017) explores how and why education became a public good in the decades after the American Revolution. He is also author of Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (2008) and What's the Point of College? Seeking Purpose in an Age of Reform (2019). With historian Joanne B. Freeman, he co-edited the recently-published volume Jeffersonians in Power. His public writing has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Hedgehog Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, USA Today, and the Washington Post, among other venues.

Marisa B. Pérez-Díaz, the District 3 State Board of Education member, was elected to the Board of Education in November 2012 and took office on Jan. 1, 2013. She is now serving her third term on the board having been re-elected in 2014 and 2018. Perez-Diaz served on the Committee on Instruction from January 2013 to December 2016. Since January 2017, she has served as vice chair of the Committee on School Initiatives. She now serves as a member of the Committee on School Finance/Permanent School Fund which oversees the Permanent School Fund, the nation's largest education endowment. The committee also oversees policies for some funding and auditing functions.

Edward B. Westermann received his PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is a Regents Professor of History at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. He has published extensively in the areas of the Holocaust, genocide, and German military history. He is the author of four books and two coedited volumes.  He was a Fulbright Fellow in Berlin, a three-time German Academic Exchange Service  Fellow, and a J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellow at the USHMM. In 2018, he was inducted into the Texas A&M University System's Chancellor's Academy for Teacher Educators. His most recent work, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany, appeared with Cornell University Press in 2021.

Laura Westhoff is professor and chair of the History Department at UMSL. She has published her research on U.S. Gilded Age and Progressive Era reform, democracy and social movements, the scholarship of teaching and learning history (SoTL), and the history of education. She is the author A Fatal Drifting Apart: Democratic Social Knowledge and Chicago Reform (The Ohio State University Press) which examines social constructions of knowledge and the emerging tensions between democracy and expertise in modern America and is currently working on a book on mid-twentieth century democratic practices, titled Educating for Activism (under contract with the University of Illinois Press). Her work has been published in the Journal of American History, The History Teacher, Women's History Review, and the History of Education Quarterly.  Until her current stint as department chair, she was a joint appointment in the College of Education at UMSL; she remains committed to advancing history education at all levels, in all venues. She holds a Ph.D. in U.S. History from Washington University in St. Louis, and remains always curious about the role historical understanding plays in personal and collective meaning-making and social action for the common good.

James Grossman is Executive Director of the American Historical Association. He was previously Vice President for Research and Education at the Newberry Library, and has taught at University of Chicago and University of California, San Diego. The author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration and A Chance to Make Good: African-Americans, 1900-1929, Grossman was project director and coeditor of the print and digital Encyclopedia of Chicago and is editor emeritus of the series "Historical Studies of Urban America," which he abandoned to his colleagues after 50 volumes. His articles and short essays have focused on various aspects of American urban history, African American history, ethnicity, higher education, and the place of history in public culture. Short pieces have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time, The Hill, New York Daily News, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, and elsewhere.