AHR Interview

A sign off and a look ahead.

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 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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.