May 31st and June 1st 2021 mark the hundredth anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the most violent anti-Black attacks in U.S. history. With the AHR’s June issue, the journal joins  in commemorating that terrible event. The cover of the issue features photographs of Tulsa's Greenwood district, and it accompanies an article by University of Oklahoma historian Karlos Hill titled “Community Engaged History: A Reflection on the 100th Anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.” In this episode, AHR editor Alex Lichtenstein speaks with Hill about community engaged history and about his own ongoing support of commemorative and memory related work in Tulsa leading up to the 2021 centenary.

AHR Interview

Karlos Hill on Community Engaged History

AHR author Andrew Denning speaks with historian Alyssa Sepinwall about historical video games and gaming history. Sepinwall is the author of the forthcoming book Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games. Denning’s AHR article, “Deep Play? Video Games and the Historical Imaginary,” appears in the March 2021 issue along with a cluster of reviews on the video game series “Assassin's Creed.”

Alyssa Sepinwall and Andrew Denning on Historical Video Games

This episode features a March 2, 2021, Virtual AHA session that hosted a discussion of the recent AHR Conversation on Black Internationalism, which appeared in the December 2020 issue of the AHR. The published conversation included seven scholars drawn from a range of fields and perspectives—Monique Bedasse (Washington University in St. Louis), Kim D. Butler (Rutgers University), Carlos Fernandes (Center of African Studies (CEA) from Eduardo Mondlane University), Dennis Laumann (University of Memphis), Tejasvi Nagaraja (Cornell University), Benjamin Talton (Temple University), and Kira Thurman (University of Michigan). The Virtual AHA, moderated by now former AHR Associate Editor Michelle Moyd (Indiana University, Bloomington), featured four of the conversation participants—Bedasse, Fernandes, Laumann, and Talton. You can find video of the session on the AHA’s YouTube channel.

An AHR Conversation on Black Internationalism

In this episode, AHR Consulting Editor Lara Putnam speaks with Johns Hopkins University historian Jessica Marie Johnson about the intersection of the history of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora and the digital humanities. Among other things, they discuss Johnson’s 2018 Social Text article “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Johnson’s recent book, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World, was published in 2020 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jessica Marie Johnson on the History of Atlantic Slavery and the Digital Humanities

Merle Eisenberg and Lee Mordechai discuss their article “The Justinianic Plague and Global Pandemics: The Making of the Plague Concept,” which appears in the December 2020 issue of the AHR. Eisenberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center at the University of Maryland. Mordechai is a senior lecturer in the History Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Together, they host the podcast Infectious Historians. Eisenberg and Mordechai spoke with Georgetown University historian John McNeill.

Merle Eisenberg and Lee Mordechai on the Plague Concept

In this episode we speak with Monica H. Green, a historian of medicine and global health, about her article, “The Four Black Deaths,” which appears in the December 2020 issue of the AHR. In it, Green draws on work in paleogenetics and phylogenetics alongside documentary evidence to suggest both a broader and more nuanced understanding of how plague spread in the late medieval world. Green spoke with Georgetown University historian John McNeill.

Monica H. Green on The Four Black Deaths

In this episode, historian Ari Joskowicz discusses “The Age of the Witness and the Age of Surveillance: Romani Holocaust Testimony and the Perils of Digital Scholarship,” which appears in the October 2020 issue of the AHR. Joskowicz is Associate Professor of History, and of Jewish Studies and European Studies at Vanderbilt University, where he also directs the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies. His publications include the 2014 book The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France. He is currently at work on a project that explores the entangled histories of Jews and Romanies in twentieth-century Western and Central Europe and in the U.S. and Israel. Joskowicz spoke with AHR consulting editor Lara Putnam.

Ari Joskowicz on His Article “The Age of the Witness and the Age of Surveillance”

In this first episode of the fourth season of the podcast, we speak with historian Ian Milligan about his 2019 book History in the Age of Abundance?: How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research. In it, Milligan explores what it means for historians’ work both now and going forward that so much of the record of human society is now born digital and accumulating at an unprecedented scale on the World Wide Web. History in the Age of Abundance? is the subject of a Review Roundtable that appears in the October 2020 issue of the AHR. Ian Milligan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Waterloo. He serves as the principle investigator for the Mellon Foundation supported project Archives Unleashed, which aims to make archived internet data more accessible to researchers by developing data search and analysis tools. His previous monograph, Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada was published in 2014.

Ian Milligan Discusses His Book History in the Age of Abundance?

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to submit an article to the AHR, how the review process works, how best to frame your submission, or what type of work the AHR is most interested in? In this special episode of AHR Interview, we invited three recent AHR authors to discuss precisely these questions. Our guests are Carina Ray of Brandeis University, Sana Aiyar of MIT, and Marc Hertzman of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The articles they discuss are: Carina E. Ray, “Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast,” The American Historical Review, Volume 119, Issue 1, February 2014, Pages 78–110, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.1.78 Sana Aiyar, “Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean: The Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Kenya, ca. 1930–1950,” The American Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 4, October 2011, Pages 987–1013, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.4.987 Marc A. Hertzman, “Fatal Differences: Suicide, Race, and Forced Labor in the Americas,” The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 2, April 2017, Pages 317–345, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.2.317 You can learn more about submitting your work to the AHR at americanhistoricalreview.org. Music in this episode is “Outer Reaches” by Bio Unit.

Submitting Your Work to the AHR

Adam McNeil interviews Georgia State University historian Julia Gaffield about the legacy and ongoing influence of Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution. Julia Gaffield is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University. Her research focuses on the early independence period in Haiti with an emphasis on connections between Haiti and other Atlantic colonies, countries, and empires in the early nineteenth century. She’s the author of the 2015 book Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution and the editor of the 2016 volume The Haitian Declaration of Independence. Her current projects include a biography of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and a history of Haiti and the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century. Her article, “The Racialization of International Law after the Haitian Revolution: The Holy See and National Sovereignty,” appears in the June 2020 issue of the AHR as part of the forum “Haiti in the Post-Revolutionary Atlantic World.” The issue also includes a review roundtable that considers Scott’s The Common Wind. Adam McNeil is a third-year PhD student in the Department of History at Rutgers University where his research focuses on the experiences of Black fugitive women during the American Revolutionary era as well as on histories of Appalachian mountain slavery and labor histories in the nineteenth century. McNeil is a regular contributor to the academic blogs Black Perspectives and The Junto, and host of the podcast New Books in African American Studies.

Julia Gaffield on Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind

In this episode we speak with historians Corinne Field and Nicholas Syrett about the April 2020 AHR Roundtable they co-edited titled “Chronological Age: A Useful Category Of Historical Analysis.” Corinne Field is Associate Professor of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia and the author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Nicholas Syrett is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas and the author of The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Together they co-edited the volume Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (New York University Press, 2015).

Corinne Field and Nicholas Syrett on the Roundtable "Chronological Age"

In this episode, Stanford University historian Ana Minian talks about her February 2020 AHR article “Offshoring Migration Control: Guatemalan Transmigrants and the Construction of Mexico as a Buffer Zone.” Minian is the author of the book Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018). Her recent op-ed "America Didn’t Always Lock Up Immigrants" appeared in the New York Times. She’s currently writing a book about the history of immigration detention.

Ana Minian on Her Article “Offshoring Migration Control"

My guest is Tyler Anbinder who, along with Cormac Ó Gráda and Simone A. Wegge, authored the article “Networks and Opportunities: A Digital History of Ireland’s Great Famine Refugees in New York,” which appears in the December 2019 issue of the AHR. Tyler Anbinder is Professor of History at George Washington University. He is author of such works as Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s; Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum; and City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York. Cormac Ó Gráda is Professor Emeritus at the University College Dublin’s School of Economics. His books include Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford University Press, 1994); Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History. Simone Wegge is Professor of Economics at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Wegge researches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European emigration and the socioeconomics of nineteenth-century European villages. Her work has appeared in the European Review of Economic History, the Journal of Economic History, Social Science History, among other venues.

Tyler Anbinder on Ireland’s Great Famine Refugees in New York

In this two-part interview, we speak with Michigan State University historian Sharon Leon. Known for her work in American religious history and in digital public history, before moving to MSU Leon spent over a decade at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University where she oversaw numerous award-winning digital projects as well as served as director for the web publishing platform Omeka, a tool whose ongoing development she continues to oversee. Her long list of digital history scholarship includes numerous chapters and articles on topics ranging from digital public history to critiques of the narrative of the field of digital history’s own development. In part 1 of the conversation, we focus on Leon’s conception of a broader and better history of digital history as well as her own journey into that field. You can read more on this aspect of Leon’s work in the 2018 volume Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities in the chapter “Complicating a ‘Great Man’ Narrative of Digital History in the United States.”

Sharon Leon Part 1: A Better History of Digital History

In part 2 of this conversation with Michigan State University historian Sharon Leon, we examine the concept of historians as data creators. Among other things, we discuss Leon’s chapter draft “The Peril and Promise of Historians as Data Creators: Perspective, Structure, and the Problem of Representation,” which you can read and comment on at 6floors.org/bracket.

Sharon Leon Part 2: Historians and Data

AHR Interview presents brief discussions with historians whose work has appeared in the American Historical Review, the official publication of the American Historical Association. Sometimes the interview accompanies an article or a featured review in a current or recent issue; other times it will feature a scholar who has recently been in the news, but whose work appeared in the journal in the past. These accessible and user-friendly podcasts highlight historical scholarship of wide interest and enormous import for issues of the day.

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AHR Interview

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