News & Advocacy

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News

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

  • AHA Researcher Testifies on Maine Social Studies Standards (April 2024)

    Apr 24, 2024 - 

    AHA researcher Scot McFarlane will testify on behalf of the AHA to the Maine Department of Education regarding the state’s current social studies standards. In a public hearing in Augusta on April 29, McFarlane will share prepared remarks. “Maine’s social studies standards… emphasize skills with little specificity about content. This is a missed opportunity. State-level social studies standards can help teachers engage their students by placing local, state, and regional history in a context that connects to national and global themes,” his testimony states. “Good, history-rich standards can guide parents, teachers, and school administrators as they prepare future generations of Maine students for success in a complex and interconnected world.”

  • AHA Members Named 2024–25 National Humanities Center Fellows (April 2024)

    Apr 24, 2024 - 

    Congratulations to AHA members Joseph M.H. Clark (Univ. of Kentucky), Mostafa Minawi (Cornell Univ.), and John W. Sweet (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), along with the other historians who have been named as 2024–25 National Humanities Center (NHC) fellows. “[The fellows] were selected from a highly competitive group of applicants representing institutions from across the globe,” said NHC president and director Robert D. Newman. “We look forward to their arrival in the fall as they each contribute their individual brilliance to creating a lively intellectual community.”

  • AHA Council Member Receives New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Teaching Award (April 2024)

    Apr 24, 2024 - 

    Congratulations to AHA Council member Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan (Rutgers Univ.), who has been awarded the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance’s 2024 Teaching Award. This award recognizes “innovation and creativity in teaching New Jersey studies on the elementary, middle, secondary, and college level.”

  • AHA Members Author Amicus Brief for SCOTUS Case Involving the Voting Rights Act (April 2024)

    Apr 24, 2024 - 

    AHA members Carol Anderson (Emory Univ.), Orville Vernon Burton (Clemson Univ.), and Alexander Keyssar (Harvard Univ.), as well as J. Morgan Kousser (California Inst. of Technology) have authored an amicus curiae brief to the US Supreme Court in Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. et al. v. Secretary of State of Georgia, an appeal involving Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. This group of voting rights historians, working with the Brennan Center for Justice and represented by Mayer Brown LLP and the Yale Law School Supreme Court Clinic, challenges Georgia’s claim that individuals and community groups cannot bring lawsuits to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In the brief, they describe the historical evidence that supports the power of individuals and groups to sue to protect their voting rights.

  • Historians Author Amicus Curiae Brief in Trump v. United States (April 2024)

    Apr 24, 2024 - 

    A group of 15 founding-era historians represented by the Brennan Center for Justice have filed an amicus curiae brief in Trump v. United States, challenging the former president’s claim of immunity. The authors include AHA members Holly Brewer (Univ. of Maryland), Rosemarie Zagarri (George Mason Univ.), Jack N. Rakove (Stanford Univ.), Jonathan Gienapp (Stanford Univ.), Gautham Rao (American Univ.), Alexander Keyssar (Harvard Univ.), and Joanne Freeman (Yale Univ.).

  • 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.”

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