Scholars Gather in Bid to Preserve History’s Role

Despite the snow storm that paralyzed much of the East Coast and Midwest last week, hundreds of historians made their way to the nation’s capital for the American Historical Association’s 128th annual meeting.

AHA ― the largest professional organization in the United States devoted to the study and promotion of history and historical thinking — offered a series of workshops for its members at this year’s convention. A wide-range of topics including how to utilize digital history in the classroom and how to fund public history despite budgetary cutbacks at the university level were prominently featured during the three-day gathering.

“We’ve made the argument to administrators that public history is actually a STEM field of sorts, because students learn skills about social networking, writing, researching and audio/visual production,” says Dr. Paul Ortiz, an associate professor of history at the University of Florida and director of the Samuel Proctor oral history project....