A Note on the AHA’s Racist Histories Initiative and Book Reviewing

Extract

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America was first published in 1935. It was never reviewed in the pages of the American Historical Review. Given the centrality of this work for the historiography of nineteenth-century US history, it is an especially egregious omission. But it is also part of a larger pattern. Through much of its first hundred years of publication, the American Historical Review largely ignored scholarship by Black historians.

The American Historical Association is currently engaged in 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. This research initiative, Racist Histories and the AHA, seeks to account for the practices, policies, people, and events that shaped the AHA’s complex role in the evolution of American racism. It includes an examination of past institutional practices and governance, along with the ways in which the association’s prizes perpetuated histories that excluded marginalized populations or distorted their lived histories. The project is also centrally concerned with how the AHA’s annual meeting and publications contributed to the legitimation of racist historical scholarship. The initial phase of the research project has focused on Black and Indigenous histories.¹