American Historical Association

Brief History of the AHA When the American Historical Association (AHA) was founded in 1884, history had only recently emerged as a distinct academic discipline. The first few professors in the field of history had only been appointed at major universities in the 1870s. Until then, wealthy men with the leisure time to pursue such endeavors did most of the writing of history and collection of historical manuscripts and archives. Recognizing that a distinct field was emerging, a number of historians in the academy proposed an organization to establish high professional standards for historical training and research. In 1884, “professors, teachers, specialists, and others interested in the advancement of history in this country” were called to gather at the annual meeting of the American Social Science Association (ASSA) in Saratoga, New York. Despite the opposition of the ASSA’s president, John Eaton, the historians present voted to establish the American Historical Association as a separate organization. Herbert Baxter Adams, an associate professor in history at Johns Hopkins University, became the first secretary of the AHA and remained in that role for the next 16 years. Andrew Dickson White, a historian and president of Cornell University, was selected as the AHA’s first president. Racist Histories and the AHA In 2021, the AHA began an initiative "to document and reckon with the Association’s role in the dissemination and legitimation of racist historical scholarship that has had a deep and lasting influence on public culture." The AHA’s founding occurred during a decade that was rife with exclusionary practices preceding the enactment of Jim Crow laws and that saw further assault on Indigenous people’s rights through the passage of the Dawes Act of 1887. At the 1893 AHA annual meeting, Frederick Jackson Turner articulated his “frontier thesis,” published as one of the most influential articles in the history of the discipline—and one that virtually ignored the presence of African Americans in the nation’s supposedly formative process and cast Indigenous people largely as obstacles. The AHA’s origins are intertwined with this racist and exclusionary historical context. Through the Racist Histories and the AHA initiative, the Association is researching and documenting its role in generating, disseminating, legitimating, and promoting histories that have helped contribute to the evolution and institutionalization of racism in the United States.