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| Historical Association of America | |
|---|---|
| Name | Historical Association of America |
| Formation | 1921 |
| Type | Nonprofit |
| Headquarters | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Region served | United States |
| Leader title | President |
| Leader name | Dr. Eleanor Whitman |
Historical Association of America
The Historical Association of America is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving, studying, and promoting American history through research, public programs, and educational outreach. Founded in the early 20th century, the Association has engaged historians, archivists, museum professionals, and civic leaders in activities ranging from scholarly publishing to community history projects. It collaborates with a wide array of institutions and figures across the historical field, drawing on connections with major archives, universities, and cultural organizations.
The Association's origins trace to a 1921 meeting that included delegates from the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, American Historical Association, New-York Historical Society, and regional bodies such as the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Pennsylvania Historical Society. Early leaders included figures associated with Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and University of Pennsylvania; they worked with staff from the National Archives and Records Administration and curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Newberry Library. Through the 1930s and 1940s the Association partnered with scholars linked to the Library of Congress Chronicling America project, archivists from the National Portrait Gallery, and educators from the Teachers College, Columbia University and the University of Chicago. Postwar expansion involved collaborations with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation, while programmatic ties extended to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the History Channel (U.S. television network), and the New Deal historical community. During the civil rights era the Association engaged historians connected to the NAACP, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and scholars publishing in venues like the Journal of American History and American Quarterly. Recent decades have seen partnerships with the Digital Public Library of America, National Museum of American History, and university centers at Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan, and Duke University.
The Association supports research initiatives similar to fellow organizations such as the American Antiquarian Society, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Social Science Research Council, and the Royal Historical Society. It advances public history projects parallel to efforts by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Historic New England, the Preservation Society of Charleston, and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Its activities include archival digitization modeled on programs at the HathiTrust, collaborative exhibitions with the Chicago History Museum and the Museum of the City of New York, and policy dialogues involving representatives from the Smithsonian Institution Archives and the Institute of Historical Research.
Membership spans professionals affiliated with institutions such as Brown University, Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, Vanderbilt University, and University of Texas at Austin, as well as independent researchers connected to repositories like the New-York Public Library, the Boston Public Library, the Clements Library, and the Bancroft Library. Organizational governance includes boards with members from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the Association of American Universities. Regional chapters maintain relationships with state historical societies including the Virginia Historical Society, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the California Historical Society, and the Texas State Historical Association.
The Association publishes journals and monographs comparable to titles from the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, William and Mary Quarterly, Civil War History, and The Public Historian. It organizes annual conferences that have shared programming with institutions such as The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Organization of American Historians, the Society for American Archaeology, and the American Association for State and Local History. Past keynote speakers and contributors have included scholars associated with Howard University, Spelman College, Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College, and Claremont Graduate University, as well as archivists from the Smithsonian Institution and curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Educational initiatives draw on models from the National Council for History Education, the Teaching American History program, and summer institutes at centers like the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Youth and teacher programs have partnered with the National History Day competition, the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars, and local projects with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The William Benton Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Digital learning tools reference technologies and collections from the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Digital Public Library of America.
Major projects have included collaborative digitization with the National Archives, exhibit curation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National WWII Museum, and oral history programs aligned with the Oral History Association and the Columbia Center for Oral History Research. Other partnerships have connected the Association with international bodies such as the British Museum, the International Council on Archives, and the European Association for American Studies, and with philanthropic programs at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Kress Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. The Association has also engaged in public scholarship efforts alongside media outlets like NPR, PBS, and The New York Times and collaborated with civic institutions including the United States Congress, the Supreme Court of the United States, and state legislatures on commemorative and archival initiatives.
Category:History organizations of the United States