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2025 president Ben Vinson III connects with fellow historians at the graduate student reception.<\/p><\/div>\n
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Historians and Their Publics<\/h3>\n
This annual meeting provided many opportunities for historians to reckon with an array of threats facing our discipline. Whether on panels, in the Exhibit Hall, at organized meetups, or over conference coffee, attendees discussed\u2014sometimes wryly, sometimes urgently\u2014how new ways of thinking about the past might counter shrinking resources, political pressures, declining enrollments, pedagogical challenges, and the whims of segments of the American public that seem alternately hungry for history and hostile to historians. The two evening plenary sessions struck tones of cautious optimism, emphasizing proactive engagement with the broadest possible audiences. Whether on campus or in our communities, these conversations suggest, there may yet be hope for our discipline to expand its reach and renew public trust.<\/p>\n
Thursday\u2019s plenary, \u201cLet Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World\u201d: Historians, Their Publics, and the 250th Anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence<\/em>, focused on how and why historical practitioners, regardless of their specific areas of academic expertise, might capitalize on public enthusiasm around the semiquincentennial celebrations kicking off in 2026. \u201cWe need to meet this moment,\u201d urged Jason Hanson (History Colorado). \u201cNothing gets people interested [in history] like an anniversary,\u201d he explained, and this awareness allows historians and historical institutions to emphasize that all Americans share a history even if we do not always agree on its precise significance for our world today.<\/p>\n At the local, state, and national levels, archives, museums, historic sites, and other organizations are planning programming as varied and diverse as the communities we serve. To engage a national public, Colleen Shogan, the former Archivist of the United States, has established In Pursuit, a nonprofit initiative that will publish a series of short essays over the next year about every president and some first ladies of the United States. There are many more such initiatives at the local and state levels. More than a dozen Western states, Hanson noted, have pooled resources to develop traveling exhibits that use aspirational ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence to frame key moments in subsequent eras in US history. In Massachusetts, to cite another example, Royall House and Slave Quarters hosts hands-on textile arts programs, including a Black weaving school and a durag workshop, to highlight the intersection of history, slavery, and fashion. It can be both valuable and empowering, the museum\u2019s executive director Kyera Singleton explained, to start with what our communities want<\/em> to talk about and then use these themes as points of entry for a richer engagement with the lives of people in the past.<\/p>\n The scale of public appetite for revolutionary history is immense. In 2025, thousands attended preview screenings (the first of which took place at AHA25) of excerpts from Ken Burns\u2019s six-part documentary series The American Revolution<\/em>, with millions more tuning in for television broadcasts or streaming it online. With interactive exhibits and innovative programming, museums and historic sites are preparing for a substantial increase in visitors, with several of the largest institutions expecting annual attendance in the millions. Historians, warned Jane Kamensky (Thomas Jefferson\u2019s Monticello), ignore these audiences at their peril.<\/p>\n Still, a comparison between preparations for America 250 and bicentennial celebrations in 1976 results in some sobering conclusions about the extent to which a dramatically altered federal funding environment may have lasting consequences. There are over 21,000 history organizations in the United States. Of these, explained John Dichtl (American Association for State and Local History), between 30 and 40 percent were founded around 1976. Bicentennial funding, Kamensky added, helped support new fields, such as Indigenous history, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities supported scholarly publications, including Edmund Morgan\u2019s American Slavery, American Freedom <\/em>(1975), that helped institutionalize a more diverse and vibrant history of the revolutionary period. \u201cWhat will come out of the semiquincentennial moment?\u201d asked Karin Wulf (John Carter Brown Library). \u201cWill there be any legacy of this?\u201d<\/p>\n It remains to be seen how historians and historical institutions will fare over the next months and years. Without the scale of federal investment that defined the bicentennial and its aftermath, it may fall to individual historians and our institutions to help set the tone. \u201cI\u2019d love to see more synthesis coming from the history field,\u201d Hanson explained in his concluding remarks. Many Americans struggle to make sense of competing and often irreconcilable claims about the past. They are looking to historians for help sorting all of this out and \u201cmaybe bringing some more of the unum<\/em> to the e pluribus<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n History education offers additional opportunities to help shape public awareness of our discipline and its practices. Saturday\u2019s plenary, Making History Indispensable to Your Institution<\/em>, kicked off a year of AHA programming about the place of history in general education and other courses required for graduation with support from the Teagle Foundation.<\/p>\n Historians presented their work in four poster sessions, including two focused on undergraduate research. Michael Baniewicz<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n As part of its History Gateways initiative (2019\u201322), the AHA supported faculty experimentation in refining introductory undergraduate courses, many of which can be used to satisfy general education requirements, to promote student success. When asked about the purpose of these courses, noted Julia Brookins (AHA), faculty generated a list of 63 goals, far more than can be accomplished in a single semester. \u201cThere\u2019s not going to be a one-size-fits-all framework at different kinds of institutions,\u201d Brookins added, \u201cbut our research revealed that there are many ways faculty and departments can approach making history in general education more vibrant.\u201d<\/p>\n However, it can be difficult for individual faculty or departments to convince administrators or colleagues in other disciplines that students need to develop historical awareness. A declining number of institutions require all undergraduate students to take introductory history courses. Many colleges and universities use thematic distribution requirements to afford undergraduate students more choice in how they satisfy general education requirements, which can affect enrollments at the department level. As senior associate dean for undergraduate education, historian Ian McNeely (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) helped to develop and implement the IDEAs in Action curriculum, which splits 1,500 courses approved for general education across nine \u201cfocus capacities.\u201d Of 449 courses that UNC-CH cleared to satisfy a requirement in \u201cengagement with the human past,\u201d only 139 are offered through the history department. That said, history courses are also included in three other core capacities on global understanding, power and society, and ways of knowing. Nevertheless, between Advanced Placement courses and dual enrollment, a growing number of students complete these requirements before they reach campus.<\/p>\n In certain contexts, flexible general education requirements grounded in the liberal arts tradition have secured the foundations for history and other humanities disciplines on campus. Enrollments in history had fallen by half before Melinda Zook (Purdue Univ.) helped establish the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program, a curriculum designed to create opportunities for students to engage with transformational texts in small classes taught by full-time faculty. The runaway success of this program has resulted in an efflorescence of high-quality teaching and humanities scholarship on campus. Since 2019, Zook explained, new faculty are required to teach 50 percent of their courses in Cornerstone, but this has allowed the college of liberal arts to hire 119 new faculty. The energy around the program, she suggested, stems from the power of philosophy and great literature from around the world to inspire our students. \u201cGen Z students recognize that they need knowledge to succeed; above all they are seeking opportunities for edification.\u201d<\/p>\n At Vanderbilt University, a core curriculum patterned after the Cornerstone model has met with similar success. \u201cGeneral education is a really important platform on your campus,\u201d observed Sarah Igo, Andrew Jackson Chair in American History and Dean of Strategic Initiatives, but \u201cyou may need to reimagine it\u201d for faculty to understand how it can enrich and deepen liberal arts education for all students. Vanderbilt\u2019s new model sacrificed a specific general education requirement in history. \u201cWe knew we were taking a bit of a gamble,\u201d she explained. \u201cBut our proposition is that if we get some of our best teachers and best historians into our new core [curriculum], we trust that our students will follow them into their home departments.\u201d And many have done so.<\/p>\n Reforming general education or other graduation requirements can present a range of challenges. The teaching-intensive models at Vanderbilt and Purdue, several audience members observed during the Q&A, may not be feasible at smaller institutions or those with different expectations for faculty workload. Colleagues in other schools and departments do not always want to share enrollments when institutional resources are scarce.<\/p>\n The potential rewards of bringing our knowledge, disciplinary habits of mind, and excitement for history to general education are both clear and substantive. As with the public interest in the semiquincentennial, a renewed focus on reforming general education might allow historians to challenge some preconceptions about what historians do and why our work matters.<\/p>\n \u2014BG<\/em><\/p>\n On Friday, Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah, co-hosts of NPR\u2019s Throughline<\/em>, joined attendees to discuss their award-winning history podcast. They appeared in conversation with Daniel Story (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz), producer of the AHA\u2019s History in Focus<\/em> podcast, at one of three events in the Sinclair Workshop on Historical Podcasting, a sponsored annual meeting series focused on podcasting and historical storytelling.<\/p>\n Work on Throughline<\/em> began, Arablouei and Abdelfatah explained, years before the first episode actually aired. The two met at NPR\u2014he was a sound designer and she a journalist\u2014and soon discovered a common interest in diversifying and enhancing public understanding of non-Western parts of the world. \u201cWe need to make a show that does for history what Radiolab<\/em> does for science,\u201d Arablouei proposed. They began to workshop their idea on nights and weekends around their other work. After two years of piloting \u201cessentially in the dark,\u201d they sent a sample to their boss. NPR green-lit the show, and the first episode aired in January 2019.<\/p>\n The show takes a \u201csound-forward approach\u201d to production, which was new for NPR when Throughline<\/em> premiered. Instead of adding music at the end, as many podcasts do, they think about sound as another character in the story. \u201cWe design in scenes; we storyboard the way you might in a show or movie,\u201d Abdelfatah said. They want listeners to feel like part of the scene, Arablouei explained. \u201cEntertainment is an important part of storytelling. No one wants to listen to a boring story.\u201d<\/p>\n To build that story, a Throughline<\/em> team member conducts extensive historical research on a topic to determine its viability as an episode subject. If they decide to move forward, they conduct more research, engage fact-checkers, and interview historians and other subject matter experts. They prioritize finding experts who can speak about their research in an engaging way. Most of the historians they interview understand that audiences are more interested in the broad strokes than the minutiae and especially interested in what their research means for today.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople don\u2019t remember facts; they remember how they feel.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Abdelfatah and Arablouei also discussed the challenges facing public media and how those challenges have affected Throughline<\/em>. After funding cuts, \u201cwe\u2019re in evolution mode,\u201d Abdelfatah said, trying to maintain the integrity of the show \u201cin terms of research and nuance and creativity\u201d while also seeking ways to do more with less. The audiences they reach and where and how people find and engage with content is changing too. According to NPR polling, their listener base is broader and more diverse than many podcast audiences, but those demographics have shifted as listening platforms have changed and diversified. Abdelfatah and Arablouei are also navigating a crowded and shifting information landscape, in which listeners have access to a broader array of media content and platforms than ever before.<\/p>\n Abdelfatah and Arablouei answered several audience questions, including one from a public historian working at a well-known historic site engaged in this year\u2019s semiquincentennial celebrations. Stating that \u201cbringing history to life\u201d can be \u201cinherently speculative\u201d and therefore \u201cscary for many\u201d historians, she asked whether they could provide \u201cadvice for those of us trying to walk that line.\u201d Abdelfatah said such narratives are being created no matter what, and the question is whether you want to be part of the conversation. If you do, \u201cbe transparent,\u201d make clear to your audience that \u201cthere are different interpretations\u201d of the topic, \u201cand explain why you\u2019re leaning toward one interpretation. The more you can incorporate the primary source materials, the more people can see and hear for themselves.\u201d Audiences have a short attention span. Without \u201chigh stakes or emotional attachment, people are not going to pay attention.\u201d Yet history is essential today, and \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of competing [interpretations] from people who aren\u2019t even making an attempt to stick to the facts.\u201d Arablouei agreed, adding that the academy\u2019s focus on facts and rigor means information is not reaching the populations who most need it. \u201cPeople don\u2019t remember facts; they remember how they feel,\u201d he said, \u201cso we have to tell these stories in a way that makes them feel something.\u201d For the podcasters and other historians who attended the Sinclair Workshop sessions, this is a key reminder that rigor and accessibility are not opposing goals and that thoughtful storytelling is essential to ensuring expert historical scholarship reaches wider public audiences.<\/p>\n \u2014HS<\/em><\/p>\n Since ChatGPT became publicly available in November 2022, concerns about artificial intelligence (particularly the tools called large language models, or LLMs) have proliferated across academia and other scholarly communities. Sessions at AHA26 wrestled with the practical and ethical problems and the potential for AI in historical research and teaching.<\/p>\n As all historian-teachers know and the panelists acknowledged at the start of Rewriting the Past? AI, Interpretation, and the Future of History Education<\/em>, AI has become normalized among students and has come to characterize much of the student work they now receive. Of the 850 students Steven Mintz (Univ. of Texas at Austin) teaches in a given semester, approximately 400 now submit virtually the same essay. The \u201ccrisis,\u201d which he described as \u201ctotally unsettling me,\u201d has arrived with \u201cno campus conversation at all,\u201d leaving individual professors to navigate the ways that student participation and interest in classes has eroded.<\/p>\n Panelists discussed how AI has changed multiple facets of their course design. Jacob Bruggeman (Johns Hopkins Univ.) now assumes that \u201cstudents are using AI,\u201d but he argued that the degree to which they cheat is determined by course design, and structured engagement with AI tools can give students an acceptable framework, and a permission structure, within which they can use AI in a history classroom. Jo Guldi (Emory Univ.) described moving to in-class writing without using AI but with \u201ca lot of talking with human engagement.\u201d She has found that getting students to write successfully takes much more scaffolding through multiple iterations than it used to. She also noted that some universities have taken radically different approaches to the landscape. Georgia Tech has banned AI in the first two years of its computer science classes, instead requiring that students write code using paper and pencil. Similarly, historians too should think about the goals of their assignments and redesign courses so their students can still meet the learning outcomes. Samuel Backer (Univ. of Maine) urged the audience to focus on the process of history. \u201cMore and more core research tasks are going to be automatable. What is the value added of historians? What does it mean to think historically?\u201d History, he argued, is a \u201cdistinctive mode of knowledge\u2014where should it be put in the world?\u201d<\/p>\n The annual Gender Equity Breakfast allowed time for conversation before a panel discussion on teaching gender and sexuality history in these troubling times.<\/p><\/div>\n Economic historian Louis R. Hyman (Johns Hopkins Univ.) has been thinking historically about the AI moment. The question \u201cWhat is the relationship of the human and the machine?\u201d has been an animating debate for much of the last 150 years, and it informs Hyman\u2019s teaching. He asks students, \u201cAre you going to cede your education to the machine? Or I can teach you to think better than the machine, write better than the machine, feel better than the machine.\u201d Hyman also spoke to the possibilities of AI in accelerating the work students can do. In one course, he estimates that he now teaches a semester of coding, a semester and a half of statistics, and a semester of history all in one semester, because of the ways AI speeds up his students\u2019 work. \u201cThey can do stuff that took me six months in grad school in two weeks,\u201d Hyman asserted. Guldi concurred, saying, \u201cYou don\u2019t need to be a linguist to write, and you don\u2019t need to be a programmer to code.\u201d<\/p>\n When it came to what AI could mean for professional historians, panelists were generally bullish while gesturing to a shrinking place for historians in the academy. Guldi articulated a vision of AI use in history classrooms and research that could help historians do the work we already do in better and more expansive ways. She offered ideas such as teaching students how to write engineering prompts for different types of archives, such as oral history, parliamentary, or visual archives, and extolled the possibilities of searching across \u201ca hundred archives in a hundred languages\u201d and having the AI help historians with the synthesis. Communicating AI\u2019s value to our colleagues is also necessary. \u201cHumanists have a very misguided idea of what AI is,\u201d Mintz said, with many dismissing it as a \u201cplagiarism machine.\u201d But behind the scenes, \u201cthere are sophisticated humanists teaching AI how to research and analyze.\u201d He believes that there are high-paying jobs for humanists working with AI, referencing an acquaintance with an English PhD who worked as a narrative analyst for Netflix, designing the story structure directions the company provides to creatives who populate the platform with their work. \u201cThe future of the American economy,\u201d Guldi argued, \u201crests on solving one problem\u2014the \u2018alignment problem,\u2019\u201d which she suggested persists because STEM grads without humanities experience design the systems with \u201cnobody in the room who has the ability to compare different documents.\u201d The MacArthur and Mellon Foundations have created a joint $500 million fund to create a more \u201cpeople-centered future for AI,\u201d which Guldi said shows that there is money for humanists to be involved in the future of AI.<\/p>\n During the Q&A, the audience seemed generally sold on the idea that there could be use cases in research, but questions focused on the ethical, cognitive, and environmental costs of AI in and outside the classroom. As time dwindled, the panelists elected to let the audience ask questions even though there was not enough time to answer them. What about the use of water and electricity and the ways that AI currently contributes to an ecological crisis? What about AI\u2019s erosion of our ability to think? As AI improves, how can we continue to make the case that historians are necessary, when administrators and public leaders seem ambivalent at best about the future of the discipline? Can humanists act ethically while improving the tools used by corporations like Amazon, Netflix, and Meta? There wasn\u2019t time to answer these and many other questions, but conversations about AI continued at sessions throughout the conference.<\/p>\n These discussions didn\u2019t stop with teaching. At Making AI Work for History: Tools, Workflows, and Research Possibilities in Archival Collections<\/em>, librarians presented a set of case studies for AI use in the archives that show promise for making archives more accessible to researchers. Loren Moulds (Univ. of Virginia Law Library) and Lorin Bruckner, Amanda Henley, Matt Jansen, and Rolando Rodriguez (all of Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) shared the ways they have been using and training AI tools to assist in tasks such as analyzing text as data, transcribing varied handwriting, and creating alt text for archival photographs.<\/p>\n With Mellon Foundation funding, the UNC team has pursued several AI-assisted projects. The initial project used text mining and machine learning to identify racist language in Jim Crow laws and other legal documents. Another has been analyzing movie catalog cards from the World War I era, which requires being able to process mixed handwriting, typed text, stamps, symbols, and marginalia\u2014all within an inconsistent structure. To improve accessibility and findability, one team has been using AI to describe photographs in the Southern Historical Collection. They tested multiple LLMs for this task, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama. In all cases, humans need to check the work being done for errors or bias. In the photo project, for example, they found that the AI exhibited gender bias in describing the people pictured. Yet even with the extensive review needed, it still sped up the process of writing such descriptions.<\/p>\n Moulds offered another case study, in which he assisted a historian with developing an AI-assisted transcription and analysis of a 1930s plantation tourism guest register. The researcher didn\u2019t require a letter-perfect transcription; instead, he was interested in learning about larger-scale trends such as how many visitors were from Northern versus Southern states and whether women were traveling alone. The text used different hands for each entry, different inks, and other challenges for an AI, and the tools did struggle with the messiness of the source material. But the AI also helped to clean the data and introduce a metadata schema. Moulds used not one tool but assembled a workflow to combine automation and human judgment in transcribing and assessing this primary source.<\/p>\n Projects like these illustrate some of the possibilities for generative AI assisting historians with research and helping archivists to maximize limited staff time and budgets. As Moulds said, \u201cHuman expertise remains essential,\u201d but these tools have the potential to help to move human labor away from repetitive tasks like transcription to the interpretative skills that are essential to historical practice. For historians interested in projects that require large-scale research, as these tools are refined and improved, their time might one day be reallocated to higher-level tasks than even complicated transcription or data coding\u2014though we\u2019re not at that point yet.<\/p>\n \u2014LA and WB<\/em><\/p>\n The annual K\u201316 Educators\u2019 Workshop, led by Lee Ann Potter (Library of Congress), focused on primary sources on revolutionary history.<\/p><\/div>\n History departments have long faced declining undergraduate enrollments and have tried to counter the popular myth that a history degree does not prepare students for employment after graduation. The data\u2014and countless history BAs out in the workforce\u2014tells a different story. How can historians better communicate this data, and the value of a history degree, to students? How can history departments counter these myths? And how can the student experience inform these efforts?<\/p>\n Attendees convened to discuss these questions at the Careers for History Majors<\/em> session at AHA26. Loren Collins (Cal Poly Humboldt) began the conversation by sharing his experience as both a history BA graduate and now a director of academic advising. He recalled when, as a student, he was told by a faculty member that his degree had taught him how to \u201cread, write, and communicate.\u201d That moment was critical, he said, to helping him understand how to convey the value of his education to a potential employer, and that perspective informs his current work. When he first started in academic advising, he encouraged history faculty to build career curriculum directly into their courses. Some resisted, he shared, thinking this approach framed the history BA as a vocational degree. But, ultimately, positive student response to and interest in built-in career curriculum eased faculty concerns.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Image2.Poster-600x400.jpg\")
Live from AHA, NPR\u2019s Throughline<\/em><\/h3>\n
AI in Teaching and Research<\/h3>\n
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Careers for History Majors<\/h3>\n
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