Two of our favorite columns in Perspectives on History are being expertly filled this month by David Lowenthal and Michael Kazin, writing for the Art of Historyand the Masters at the Movies series, respectively. We are also exploring a new column, Thinking Historically, with an essay by Susan Ferber on Hurricane Sandy, and we have two articles in our Teaching section—Jeremy Adelman on the massive open online course (MOOC) he taught at Princeton, and Mart A. Stewart on the history class he took to Vietnam.

AHA President Kenneth Pomeranz discusses how historical expertise can help us explain what history offers the nonexpert, and Executive Director James Grossman writes about why he spent New Year’s Eve at the National Archives. John McNeill, vice president, Research Division, complements Adelman’s article by discussing what MOOCs might mean for the future of historical research.

This month’s Research section features two intriguing text clouds created by Robert Townsend to visually represent dissertation topics in history from 1920 to 1960 and 1993 to 2012, and our News section offers reports from recent events on the presidential inauguration, the Emancipation Proclamation sesquicentennial, the Chronicle’s Adjunct Project, and women’s history and the National Park Service.

The National Coalition for History’s Lee White has an important update on the coalition’s advocacy in relation to a FOIA ruling that has kept a CIA history of the Bay of Pigs invasion classified—over 30 years after it was written. Meanwhile, the National History Center’s Marian J. Barber updates readers on events featuring historian Eric Foner and former Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs.

All this and more can be found in Perspectives Online today, and the full-color, fully illustrated Perspectives on History is already in the mail to members and subscribers.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.