Tag: American Historical Association

CFP: Methods for Archival Silence in Early History, American Historical Review

The American Historical Review seeks proposals for a special issue illustrating a range of methodological approaches to archival silence developed by scholars of early history. Articles may be grounded in any part of the world and address any topic as long as they are method-driven, focused on archival silence, and situated early within the periodization of your field.

About the Issue
What should historians do when our sources do not tell us what we want to know? Although this may be a universal experience of historical research, the problem arises in various forms. Some silences are intentional, others unintentional. Some sources are minimal, others extensive but off-topic. Some sources are inaccessible, some have not been preserved, some were never created. Sometimes we do not or cannot know whether our desired sources ever existed, or, if they did, what happened to them. Silences cluster around certain topics, places, and periods more than others.

Historians have articulated this problem in a variety of ways. This call uses the language of archival silence and silencing developed by Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Marisa Fuentes. It could have drawn on the concept of the subaltern (Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak), strategically produced silence and plausible stories (Natalie Zemon Davis), records designed for jettison (Marina Rustow), hidden transcripts (James Scott), living oral traditions (Bethwell A. Ogot), or writing off the radar (James Lockhart), to name only a few.

Faced with archival silence, historians have developed a range of methods for working in, through, and around it. Some techniques and approaches have become characteristic of expertise in early periods. Others are applied by historians across specializations. These include but are not limited to reading against the grain; creative combination of well-known sources; creative use of unusual or little-known sources; oral and other forms of non-written record; technical skills in the so-called ancillary disciplines (numismatics, paleography, codicology, epigraphy, and more); interdisciplinary approaches to method (anthropology, archaeology, literature, linguistics, and more) and to what constitutes a source (climate data, aDNA, physical objects, art, and more); critical fabulation or disciplined imagination; and reframing our questions to build on our sources’ strengths.

Proposals should be submitted via Google Form by September 16, 2025. Proposals should be no more than 800 words in length and should address the following questions:

  • What is your field of historical research? In the context of your field, why is your project considered early?
  • Briefly describe the archive(s) or bod(ies) of sources on which your project is based. In what sense are these sources silent?
  • Briefly describe the method(s) that you use to work with these sources. What methodological intervention does your project make, and why is it significant?
  • What form will your project take in the journal?

We invite projects in a wide variety of forms. They can include, but are not limited to:

  • Traditional research articles (no more than 8,000 words, excluding footnotes)
  • Image- or video-centered projects
  • Digital history/humanities projects
  • Public history projects or virtual exhibitions
  • Pedagogical projects that examine approaches to methodology and archival silence in the classroom

Decisions on proposals will be announced in November 2025. A positive decision does not guarantee publication in the journal but is rather an invitation to submit a full and complete version of the proposed project for peer review. The submission deadline for complete projects for peer review is May 1, 2026. We anticipate publication of the special issue in 2027.

Please contact the special issue editor, Hannah Barker (hannah.barker.1@asu.edu), with questions.

American Historical Association Announces 2017 Prize Winners

The American Historical Association is pleased to announce the winners of its 2017 prizes. The AHA offers annual prizes honoring exceptional books, distinguished teaching and mentoring in the classroom, public history, and other historical projects. Since 1896, the Association has conferred over a thousand awards. This year’s finalists were selected from a field of over 1,300 entries by nearly 100 dedicated prize committee members. The names, publications, and projects of those who received these awards are a catalog of the best work produced in the historical discipline.

The William and Edwyna Gilbert Award for the best article in a journal, magazine, or other serial on teaching history

Laura K. Muñoz (Texas A&M Univ.-Corpus Christi) for “Civil Rights, Educational Inequality, and Transnational Takes on the US History Survey,” History of Education Quarterly 56, no. 1 (February 2016)

The J. Franklin Jameson Award for the editing of historical primary sources

The late Karsten Friis-Jensen, ed., and Peter Fisher, trans., for Saxo Grammaticus: Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes, 2 vols. (Oxford Univ. Press, 2015)

See full list of awards.

Research Survey: Historians and Subscription Primary Source Databases

Though this survey is directed to historians, they want participants regardless of AHA membership. This is a chance to help inform the AHA about access to primary sources relevant to historical scholarship.

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The AHA is investigating access to research databases and other resources used by historians. Independent and unaffiliated scholars, as well as historians at smaller institutions often do not have access to subscription materials necessary for their work. We would like you to answer a few questions that will help us determine what we can do to help scholars with this problem. We are looking for responses from anyone who considers themselves a historian, regardless of AHA membership status, so please pass this survey on to your colleagues. Your responses will be extremely helpful to the AHA’s efforts to promote historical education and research, and we thank you for taking the time to help us gather this important information.

This survey is brief and should take no more than 5-10 minutes to complete. Please respond by October 4, 2017 and do not hesitate to contact zjackson@historians.org if you have any further questions or comments.

The purpose of this survey is to allow the AHA to look into the extent of the problem of access to digital primary and secondary source databases for historical research. Many proprietary databases are only offered through university or other institutional subscription and are thus only available to scholars whose institution subscribes. This means that scholars without affiliations and those at places that do not subscribe to the resource they need are unable to access the materials they need.

When answering these questions please think only of subscription digital research collections (either primary or secondary source), such as JSTOR, Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Proquest Historical Newspapers, etc. Do not list or refer to materials that can be accessed for free. This brief questionnaire has a maximum of 9 questions and should take no more than 5-10 minutes to complete.