Papers on this panel highlight new ways to draw on language as both a method of historical inquiry and a new archive of the past. The approaches highlighted here demand that historians grapple with new scales of sociality, chronologies of the past, and ethical engagements with the descendants of the men and women whose histories we seek. Foregrounding new ways of ‘hearing’ the voices of the past highlights the experiences and contributions of people otherwise ‘silenced’ in traditional historical archives. This work challenges institutions, funders, and professional organizations to consider what is at stake in cross-disciplinary training—the opportunity to be not a consumer but a practitioner in another field—and asks how the methods of other disciplines figure into doctoral and postdoctoral training. Most importantly, these papers illustrate how the past empowers as understood through language empowers descendant communities in the here and now.