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News

The latest activity of the AHA and historians in supporting history and historical thinking.

  • AHA Endorses Letter Asking for Congressional Recognition of the US Army’s First Uniformed Female Combatants (April 2024)

    Apr 22, 2024 - 

    The AHA endorsed a letter from 55 professional historians asking members of Congress to co-sponsor S.815 and H.R. 1572, bills that would award the Congressional Gold Medal to the US Army’s first uniformed female combatants—the switchboard operators who connected calls between the front lines and Army command during World War I. “When survivors sailed home in 1919, the Army informed them that their dog-tags and dedicated service did not entitle them to the same Victory Medals, cash bonuses, or hospitalization for disability granted other soldiers,” the letter states. “A group of descendants and the World War One Centennial Commission have spearheaded an effort to obtain the Congressional Gold Medal on their behalf. Doing so would not only honor these pioneers, but every woman in uniform since.”

  • AHA Members Awarded 2024 NEH Grants (April 2024)

    Apr 18, 2024 - 

    Congratulations to the 12 AHA members who were selected as recipients for grants to support humanities projects from the National Endowment for the Humanities. “From studies of the impact of emerging technologies on humans to new documentaries that lift up undertold stories, these projects show how the humanities help us understand ourselves and our world,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe.

  • AHA Executive Director Quoted in Huffington Post Article on Florida Law Requiring Schools to Teach “Evils of Communism” (April 2024)

    Apr 18, 2024 - 

    AHA executive director Jim Grossman was quoted in a Huffington Post article by Lydia O’Connor on a new Florida law that requires K–12 schools to teach what Governor Ron DeSantis calls “the truth about the evils of communism.” “If our goal is to help students learn about threats to freedom and democracy, why are we not also requiring that they learn about fascism?” Grossman said. “This legislation is largely symbolic, catering to popular notions of a continuing‘threat’ of communism in the United States. A good teacher can stay within the law and help students learn how communism has evolved internationally and nationally, including a variety of perspectives on how it has worked in practice in specific countries.”

  • AHA Members Awarded 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships (April 2024)

    Apr 17, 2024 - 

    Congratulations to AHA members Brian A. Catlos (Univ. of Colorado, Boulder), Carol E. Harrison (Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia), Tiya A. Miles (Harvard Univ.), and Andrew M. Riggsby (Univ. of Texas, Austin), along with all of the other historians who have been awarded 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships. The 2024 fellows were “chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants” based on “prior career achievement and exceptional promise.”

  • AHA Member Receives Award in French History for American Historical Review Article (April 2024)

    Apr 08, 2024 - 

    Congratulations to AHA member Lauren R. Clay (Vanderbilt Univ.), whose article “Liberty, Equality, Slavery: Debating the Slave Trade in Revolutionary France” was awarded the 2023 William Koren Jr. Prize for the most outstanding article in French history by the Society for French Historical Studies. Clay’s article, which was published in the March 2023 issue of the American Historical Review, “challenges many of our assumptions about the revolutionary era as well as our approaches to global history.”

  • AHA Members Awarded 2024 ACLS Fellowships (April 2024)

    Apr 08, 2024 - 

    Congratulations to the eight AHA members who were awarded 2024 ACLS Fellowships: Bobby Cervantes (Harvard Univ.), Robert Franco (Kenyon Coll.), Charlotte Kiechel (Williams Coll.), Judith Mansilla (Florida International Univ.), Catherine Mas (Florida International Univ.), Alberto Ortiz Díaz (Univ. of Texas, Arlington), Yi Ren (Harvard Univ.), and Hermann von Hesse (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). ACLS fellowships “supports scholars who are poised to make original and significant contributions to knowledge in any field of the humanities or interpretive social sciences.”

  • AHA Executive Director Appears on SpeechMatters Podcast to Discuss Divisive Concepts (April 2024)

    Apr 02, 2024 - 

    AHA executive director Jim Grossman appeared on SpeechMatters, the official podcast of the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, to discuss “divisive concepts” legislation and how it creates “challenges for the teaching and learning of history that compromise democratic values and institutions.”

  • AHA Member Appears on Writing It! Podcast to Discuss Creating a Graphic History (April 2024)

    Apr 02, 2024 - 

    AHA member Nina Caputo (Univ. of Florida), along with illustrator Liz Clarke, appeared on Writing It!, a podcast from the University of Florida’s Center for Jewish Studies, to discuss their book, Debating Truth: The Barcelona Disputation of 1263, A Graphic History (Univ. of Oxford Press). The episode delves into the process of making a graphic history, the collaboration between historian and illustrator, and why graphic history is a worthwhile medium. 

  • AHA Member Interviewed in IGN about Using Video Games to Teach History (March 2024)

    Mar 18, 2024 - 

    AHA member Tore Olsson (Univ. of Tennessee) was interviewed by Wesley Yin-Poole for IGN about his use of the video game Red Dead Redemption as a teaching tool in his American history classes. “[H]istorians, we use pop culture all the time. We use film and literature and TV series, but a lot of historians have been reluctant to engage video games for various reasons. And I decided, well, no, I want to take this medium seriously, because it’s so dominant,” Olsson said. “Video games are so powerful at instilling that curiosity and passion in people. The games themselves usually can’t provide the full story, but they can at least get people fascinated and interested in learning more about it.” Olsson also wrote about teaching with video games in the December 2023 issue of the American Historical Review.

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