photographed during their annual meeting on December 30, 1889, in
Washington, D.C. Seated (left to right) are:
William Poole,
Justin Winsor,
Charles Kendall Adams (President),
George Bancroft,
John Jay, and
Andrew Dickson White, Standing (left to right) are:
Herbert B. Adams and
Clarence Winthrop Bowen The early leaders of the association were mostly gentlemen with the leisure and means to write many of the great 19th-century works of history, such as
George Bancroft,
Justin Winsor, and
James Ford Rhodes. However, as former AHA president
James J. Sheehan points out, the association always tried to serve multiple constituencies, "including
archivists, members of state and local historical societies, teachers, and amateur historians, who looked to it – and not always with success or satisfaction – for representation and support."
Women and African Americans According to the Association,
Thavolia Glymph was elected president of the AHA for the term beginning in 2024. The 140th president, she is the first Black woman to hold that post.
Publication standards From its founding, the association was largely managed by historians employed at colleges and universities, and served a critical role in defining their interests as a profession. The association's first president,
Andrew Dickson White, was president of
Cornell University, and its first secretary,
Herbert Baxter Adams, established one of the first history Ph.D. programs to follow the new German seminary method at
Johns Hopkins University. The clearest expression of this academic impulse in history came in the development of the
American Historical Review in 1895. Formed by historians at a number of the most important universities in the United States, it followed the model of European history journals. Under the early editorship of
J. Franklin Jameson, the
Review published several long scholarly articles every issue, only after they had been vetted by scholars and approved by the editor. Each issue also reviewed a number of history books for their conformity to the new professional norms and scholarly standards that were taught at leading graduate schools to Ph.D. candidates. From the AHR, Sheehan concludes, "a junior scholar learned what it meant to be a historian of a certain sort".
AHA and public history Meringolo (2004) compares academic and
public history. Unlike academic history, public history is typically a collaborative effort, does not necessarily rely on primary research, is more democratic in participation, and does not aspire to absolute "scientific" objectivity. Historical museums, documentary editing, heritage movements and historical preservation are considered public history. Though activities now associated with public history originated in the AHA, these activities separated out in the 1930s due to differences in methodology, focus, and purpose. The foundations of public history were laid on the middle ground between academic history and the public audience by
National Park Service administrators during the 1920s–30s. The academicians insisted on a perspective that looked beyond particular localities to a larger national and international perspective, and that in practice it should be done along modern and scientific lines. To that end, the association actively promoted excellence in the areas of research, the association published a series of annual reports through the
Smithsonian Institution and adopted
The American Historical Review in 1898 to provide early outlets for this new brand of professional scholarship.
Establishing a national history curriculum In 1896, the association appointed a "Committee of Seven" to develop a national standard for college admission requirements in the field of history. Before this time, individual colleges defined their own entrance requirements. After substantial surveys of prevailing teaching methods, emphases and curricula in secondary schools, the Committee published "The Study of History in Schools" in 1898. Their report largely defined the way history would be taught at the
high school level as a preparation for college, and wrestled with issues about how the field should relate to the other social studies. The Committee recommended four blocks of Western history, to be taught in chronological order—ancient, medieval and modern European, English, and American history and civil government—and advised that teachers "tell a story" and "bring out dramatic aspects" to make history come alive.[T]he student who is taught to consider political subjects in school, who is led to look at matters historically, has some mental equipment for a comprehension of the political and social problems that will confront him in everyday life, and has received practical preparation for social adaptation and for forceful participation in civic activities.... The pupil should see the growth of the institutions which surround him; he should see the work of men; he should study the living concrete facts of the past; he should know of nations that have risen and fallen; he should see tyranny, vulgarity, greed, benevolence, patriotism, self-sacrifice, brought out in the lives and works of men. So strongly has this very thought taken hold of writers of civil government, that they no longer content themselves with a description of the government as it is, but describe at considerable length the origin and development of the institutions of which they speak.
Resolutions The association historically avoided addressing contemporary politics and made no statements on the
Vietnam War or
South African apartheid. In 2007, the group Historians for Peace and Democracy presented a resolution against the
Iraq War, which passed under president
Barbara Weinstein. At the 2025 annual meeting, AHA members passed a resolution condemning alleged
scholasticide in the
Israel-Gaza War by a 428-to-88 vote. Association elected council vetoed the resolution. The
American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) criticized the proposed resolution as a “misguided resolution, which grossly undermines the rules of causal inference to advance a near-obsessive anti-Israel narrative that casts the Jewish state as a uniquely malevolent aggressor.” Likewise the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned the resolution, refuting the allegation and accusing the AHA of “framing [that] perpetuates harmful biases and reinforces narratives that marginalize Jewish voices,”. ==Selected awards==