More explicitly, the project seeks to understand the Association’s role in the evolution of racist scholarship and teaching within the discipline, and used one of the U-M History Department’s History Lab courses as the vehicle for the early stages of what will likely be a multi-year collaboration. History Labs are project-based classes designed to teach students that expertise comes in various forms, and that the skills of a historian are transferable beyond one’s field and applicable to a variety of professional contexts. The model for these courses was launched as a career diversity initiative and each subsequent iteration has a dual goal: to provide hands-on, faculty-led training in collaborative historical research methods and practice; and to offer graduate students experience working with institutional partners such as museums, organizations and institutions beyond the academy.

The “Inside the AHA” class, offered in Winter 2021, centered on the practice of client-based institutional research via the history of racism and other modes of exclusion in shaping one of the leading professional associations in the United States. With presentations on the drive toward professionalism, especially from 1926 to 1940, the institutional and scholarly impact of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” and implications of the Dunning School’s silencing of scholars such as W.E.B. DuBois, this session brings together presentations on our preliminary findings based on the three broad recommendations for ways that the AHA might continue to confront -- and redress -- historical inequities in the profession.