In keeping with tradition, every year a representative from the RNHS office attends the annual conference of the American Historical Association (AHA) to strengthen ties with our American sister organisation and exchange knowledge. This year, it was my turn for the first time to travel to Chicago, where the 2026 edition took place.
During the conference, the stately Boulevard Room of the Hilton was still decorated for Christmas.
Although certain aspects of the conference resemble the RNHS's Historicidagen (Historians’ Days), there are also major differences. First of all, the scale of the event is obviously very different. The AHA is the largest professional association of historians in the world, and the AHA conference is therefore the largest gathering of historians of the year. This year, there were around 3,500 attendees. The 350 different sessions of the conference took place in two hotels in downtown Chicago, which were connected by a shuttle service – not with simple buses, but with real limo vans with tinted windows. Traditional panels and roundtables, as well as more informal workshops and meetups, were organised in the windowless and often somewhat soulless conference rooms of the Hilton and Palmer House. The more atmospheric ballrooms of both hotels, decorated with gold leaf and rococo curls, hosted the more chic parts of the programme, such as the plenary sessions, a speech by the president of the AHA, and an agonisingly long awards ceremony. There was also an astonishing number of receptions: on Saturday evening, in addition to the presidential reception, there were separate receptions for LGBTQ+ historians, public historians, and even “two-year faculty”.
Lorraine Daston gives a short acceptance speech after receiving an Award for Scholarly Distinction during the awards ceremony.
In addition to sharing research results, networking is one of the most important pillars of this annual meeting. As desk editor of BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review, I was able to attend the editors' breakfast on the first morning of the conference. Our colleagues from the American Historical Review and other, mainly American, journals were very welcoming. It was stimulating to be able to exchange ideas with them about publishing an academic historical journal and the challenges we all face as editors. As I am heavily involved in the review section of BMGN, it was particularly inspiring to hear how my colleague Lauren Brand and her team manage to have more than seven hundred works on a wide variety of historical topics reviewed by peers every year.
An important topic of discussion, both during the editors' breakfast and at the conference in general, was AI. The common thread running through all the discussions and sessions I attended on this subject is that historians are not yet sure how to deal with this new technology. Magazine editors, for example, wondered what position they should take when they notice that authors have used AI in their articles – some see no problem with artificial intelligence being used to translate texts or edit parts of texts, while others insisted that the author is always responsible for what they submit, even though it is impossible to find out exactly what happens to your research results once you throw them into the black box of an AI programme. An important, related aspect of dealing with artificial intelligence that raised many questions was how historians should position themselves vis-à-vis large companies that use our research results to train their models: not only articles that have already been published, but also interim reports that authors share with AI during the research process and that have not yet been made public.
The topic of AI was also regularly discussed in other parts of the conference programme. In a session on career prospects for recent history graduates, the fear and uncertainty among the audience was palpable. The traditional narrative that history students have always heard is, of course, that as historians they are extremely good at processing large amounts of information and can write clearly on that basis. But won't AI eventually be able to do that much better? Fortunately, there was what I consider to be a typically American positive view of problems: every challenge is an opportunity. As one of the panellists emphasised: doesn't our background make us, as historians, particularly well suited to working with AI? We are problem solvers and critical thinkers who can see everything in perspective and are good at determining the reliability of information, which makes us extremely valuable to employers in the age of AI, he argued.
Impression of the session ‘How to get Published in Latin American History’
The same combative attitude was also evident in discussions about the other hot topic of this conference: the political climate in the US, and by extension in the rest of the world. In many of the sessions, participants asked themselves how they should deal with the loss of subsidies, the scrapping of history courses, and attacks on both the results of historical research and historians themselves. Throughout the various sessions I attended on these themes, roughly two answers were given. On the one hand, there is a group that argues that historians should simply make the best of the situation. In his presidential address, for example, AHA President Ben Vinson III clearly opted not to go on the offensive and instead proposed a nine-point plan aimed more at slowly influencing the system. Others in this more moderate camp argued that threatened history departments at small universities should focus on introducing compulsory history-oriented minor subjects for all students at these institutions, in order to demonstrate the usefulness of historical research and to enthuse new students about the study of history. A few even argued that their colleagues should stop writing history in a way that only appeals to half the country, and that they would be better off avoiding political discussions about the genocide in Gaza. After all, “being too loud can get your budgets cut”.
AHA President Ben Vinson III during his presidential address, entitled ‘Reflections on Our Times’.
However, the vast majority of conference attendees had a very different opinion about the turbulent waters in which historical science finds itself. This was most evident in the session entitled ‘Historians Under Fire’, a so-called late-breaking session that was added to the programme at the last minute. The panel consisted of six historians who had all been victims of smear and defamation campaigns, with major consequences for them personally and their careers. What struck me most about this session was that none of the panellists resigned themselves to the attacks. For example, a Black historian who had been threatened and doxxed online several times over a period of fifteen years set up an informal safety network of colleagues and friends, because “loving yourself means that you should not live in fear”. Another panellist was dismissed by the rector of his institution after trolls had produced a cut-and-paste video of him in which he appeared to be inciting violence. However, he was a member of a trade union and managed to set up a major campaign, which taught him that fighting back against radical forces can also be enjoyable. In the concluding discussion, all panel members emphasised that historians are not powerless, that we must unite in trade unions and professional associations, and that in this way we can stand up to attacks by malicious individuals.
These discussions about the major challenges facing historians today beautifully demonstrated the resilience of our profession, but above all of historians themselves. It also made me realise once again how important it is, especially in times of increasing digitisation and individualisation, to meet in person, listen to each other and engage in conversation. Moreover, after my visit to Chicago, I am even more convinced that it is of great importance for our profession, which is also under pressure in the Netherlands, to have a strong, decisive professional association such as the RNHS.