This panel focuses on the "how to" for historians. We explore how historians can make convenient, relevant, and well-researched scholarly history for new, including more diverse and younger, audiences. We also reflect on how in doing this historians can play a role in building community within an increasingly polarized society.

Paul Kerry will discuss how the AHA Council's "Guidelines for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship (2023)" holds a key--if history departments are willing to accept it--to opening the door to what is so desperately needed during an age of fake news, slickly-produced partisan histories, and shockingly low levels of public trust in government and core institutions of society: wider, broader, and deeper engagement of professional historians.

Zachary Davis, a founding producer of HarvardX, helped to create Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and felt the hope and excitement that a revolution in education was unfolding as elite universities poured significant resources into developing technological platforms and institutional capacities to meet the new opportunity to democratize learning at a global level. He also witnessed the challenges that MOOCs presented, including uncomfortable questions about who was benefitting from this model. He will address the recent history of digital education innovation and introduce how Cohort-Based Courses (CBCs) are offering a more structured, smaller and more collaborative, community-oriented, and interactive learning experiences.

Liz Covart, a veteran of exploring and piloting how historians can reach broader audiences, has produced scholarly history, applied and public history, as well as worked in the digital humanities. As the Founding Director of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Liz is grappling with cutting-edge public history questions and will give her thinking on how emerging virtual and experiential technologies, as well as artificial intelligence, can be used to create an interactive online history museum experience, that will motivate more in-person visits to museums and inspire new history majors.

Greg Jackson observes that younger audiences are increasingly learning their history from podcasts and multimedia platforms that have great reach. Yet, these are often not written and produced by trained historians. He will address the challenges of producing deeply-informed, non-partisan history podcasts by describing his work on HISTORY THAT DOESN'T SUCK, the number one history podcast on Spotify and a top-ten Apple Podcasts. Moreover, he will share his experience of taking history "on the road" via a theatrical history production that went on national tour to live audiences.

This panel will also be guided by the insights of its chair, Katherine Kitterman, whose public history work has focused on bringing women's history to a broader public.