Despite the snow storm that paralyzed much of the East Coast and Midwest last week, hundreds of historians made their way to the nation’s capital for the American Historical Association’s 128th annual meeting.
AHA ― the largest professional organization in the United States devoted to the study and promotion of history and historical thinking — offered a series of workshops for its members at this year’s convention. A wide-range of topics including how to utilize digital history in the classroom and how to fund public history despite budgetary cutbacks at the university level were prominently featured during the three-day gathering.
“We’ve made the argument to administrators that public history is actually a STEM field of sorts, because students learn skills about social networking, writing, researching and audio/visual production,” says Dr. Paul Ortiz, an associate professor of history at the University of Florida and director of the Samuel Proctor oral history project.
In another session, prominent women historians like Drs. Darlene Clark Hine, Leona Auslander, Crystal Feimster, Patricia Graham, Linda Kerber and Alice Kessler-Harris, discussed the historical struggles of trying to situate women in the history books.
Hine, who teaches at Northwestern University and has written extensively about African-American women, said that she was once told by another female colleague that Black women were not worthy of serious intellectual study.
According to Dr. James Grossman, executive director of AHA, the annual convention is a place for historians both in and outside of the academy to gather and discuss ideas. This year’s meeting was themed “Disagreements, Debate and Discussion” with the goal of pushing participants to examine contemporary historical events where historians have radically differed, such as the wars of the 1990s.
