History in Focus

Historian Lydia Walker discusses international advocacy for Tibet on the part of the US and India in the early Cold War and how those efforts resulted in a sort of humanitarian commodification of the Tibetan cause. And AHR editor Mark Bradley looks ahead with Daniel at what’s coming up at the 2023 AHA Annual Meeting and in upcoming issues of the AHR.

Historian Elizabeth Hinton explores W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1935 magnum opus Black Reconstruction. We also hear from Eric Foner, Chad Williams, Sue Mobley, and Kendra Field. The AHR chose not to review Black Reconstruction when it was first published. A review by Hinton appears in the December 2022 issue.

Art critic Lee Weng-Choy discusses his and curator Zoe Butt’s conversation on historical practice in contemporary art. And Kate Brown speaks with Martha Hodes about her article exploring the process of writing about her childhood experience as a passenger in an airplane hijacking in September 1970.

Andrew Preston offers a reassessment of America’s Liberal Protestants, especially on the subject of race. And Pete Burkholder and Dana Schaffer discuss the national survey “History, the Past, and Public Culture.” In both parts, the question What is history? hovers just below, or above, the surface.

Historian Alexis Dudden and graphic artist Kim Inthavong discuss their collaborative work on history, memory, and activism in Okinawa, Japan. Their piece, “Okinawa: Territory as Monument,” appears in the History Lab section of the September issue of the AHR. Inthavong’s graphic panels illustrating Okinawans’ present-day struggle over U.S. military presence in the islands can be previewed at americanhistoricalreview.org.

AHR editor Mark Bradley talks with historian Diana Paton about her article “Gender History, Global History, and Atlantic Slavery: On Racial Capitalism and Social Reproduction.” Then, a conversation with Pure+Applied designers Paul Carlos and Urshula Barbour about the AHR’s first major redesign in over fifty years.

The Blackivists, a collective of professionally trained Black archivists in Chicago, partner with institutions and community groups to help preserve the city’s Black cultural heritage as well as model reparative approaches to archives and archiving. Daniel talks with Ashley Farmer, who teamed up with the Blackivists to produce the AHR History Lab piece “Toward an Archival Reckoning” for the June 2022 issue. One of the collective—Stacie Williams—joins Ashley to talk about the group’s work. And Adom Getachew checks in to set this project in the context of a larger arc of upcoming Lab entries on the theme of “engaged history.”

Daniel talks with AHR Associate Editor Fei-Hsien Wang about the Reviews section of the March 2022 issue, including a cluster of five history podcast reviews and a new column called Authors in Conversation. Shawn McHale and Christopher Goscha kicked off that column with reviews of each other’s recent books on the Indochina War, and they talk here about their work and their experience of trying out this approach to reviewing.

In this special episode, we look at Jacqueline Jones’s AHA Presidential Address, “Historians and Their Publics, Then and Now,” delivered on January 7th, 2022, at the AHA annual meeting in New Orleans. You’ll hear an abridged version of the address paired with a conversation between Jacqueline and Mark Bradley about the address. Jacqueline Jones served as president of the American Historical Association in 2021.

This episode explores unlikely ways into research and what can happen when we confront what seems like a deadend. Daniel talks with Judd Kinzley about his article “Wartime Dollars and the Crowning of China’s Hog-Bristle King: The Dubious Legacies of US Aid, 1938–49.” And History Unclassified editor Kate Brown speaks with Jennifer Lambe about her article “Christine Jorgensen in Cuba: On Dormant Leads and Archival Dead Ends.”