The 2025 Annual Meeting for the Organization of American Historians opened Thursday in Chicago as more than 1,500 historians and educators gathered at the Sheraton Grand, our host for this year’s conference. The sun was shining on the Chicago River—visible from the Sheraton Grand—a welcome respite from the storms on Wednesday.
As part of Thursday’s events, attendees could join a walking tour to visit the Obama Presidential Center, which is set to open in late 2025. The tour highlighted the center’s connections to Chicago, the South Side, and presidential history.
As always, the staff of the Journal of American History are here to bring you highlights from the conference as we attend panels, roundtables, discussions, and plenaries. Read on to learn more!
During the first session of the day, Bench Ansfield (Temple University) chaired the panel “New Approaches to Housing, Landlords, and Tenants in U.S. History” with panelists Nathalie Barton (Vanderbilt University), Brian Whetstone (National Park Service), and Maggie Schreiner (City University of New York Graduate Center). Remarking on the dearth of historiographical work on renting rather than homeownership, the panelists shared their work on what Ansfield termed the “landlord-tenant relation as a structuring antagonism in U.S. history.” Barton kicked off the panel by discussing how tenant complaints in mid-twentieth century Chicago shaped the landlord-tenant relationship and reflected contested gender, race, and class norms. Though directed to the landlords, these complaints usually targeted other tenants, indicating the extent to which tenants viewed landlords as responsible for intervening in and policing the private lives of their neighbors. These complaints formed a different strain of tenant activism with a more individualistic and reactionary bent than that of rent strikers and political organizers. Whetstone explored employee housing in the National Parks Service (NPS), framing the NPS as a kind of unlikely landlord on a massive scale, collecting rent from its thousands of employees who lived at the parks. For Whetstone, of particular note was the ways in which the NPS used architecture to advance its ideological mission, using “rustic” design to legitimate and assist in the ongoing erasure of indigenous land dispossession. Schreiner’s paper examined housing insecurity in New York City’s AIDS crisis, exploring how structural discrimination intertwined with landlords’ homophobia and AIDS hysteria to heighten the vulnerability of gay and lesbian tenants. Schreiner argued that to understand the particular precarity of queer tenants, it’s crucial to think through how landlords’ homophobia worked in tandem with the structural homophobia of the “straight state.”
The JAH podcast is also at the conference, inviting panelists into further conversation. These conversations will be published on the podcast in the coming weeks. Here, editorial assistant Kasha Appleton interviews panelists from “New Histories of Enslavement and Emancipation in the North.” From left to right: Christy Clark-Pujara, Andrea Mosterman, Gloria Whiting, Kasha Appleton, Cory Young, and Max Speare.
In the afternoon, Wendy Gamber (Indiana University, Bloomington) chaired the panel, “Reckoning with Race in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era” with commentator Douglas Flowe (Washington University in St. Louis) and panelists Elaine Frantz (Kent State University), Lauren Henley (University of Richmond), Matthew Vaz (City College of New York) and Amy Louise Wood (Illinois State University). Discussing the new scholarship of race in this period, Flowe commented that a common theme between all the papers was an interest in exploring how Gilded Age and Progressive Era legal understandings of race and crime were constantly contested throughout the period. Frantz began that discussion by explaining the work of the first Black policemen in Pittsburgh, examining how their occupation tested understandings of what was the proper limit for Black people’s legal authority in society. Vaz explored the racialized history of gambling and its common historical use as an excuse to arrest tens of thousands of people of color. Later, Wood described how the origins of early advocacy movements for supporting Black prisoners can be found in new phenology sciences of the 19th century and Henley described how a plot to murder children in Oklahoma led to new legal understandings of racially motivated asset seizure. All of the panelists shared an interest in the law and how racial discourses of the period influenced the boundaries of legal interpretations.
During the 2:45 PM session, Michael Stamm (Michigan State University) chaired and commentated the panel, “Agricultural Excess: Waste and Plenty in the 20th-Century United States,” with papers from Helen Zoe Veit (Michigan State University), Emmet von Stackelberg (Harvard University), and Sam Hege (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), though Hege was not able to make it to the conference. Both Veit and von Stackelberg/Hege discussed the afterlife of cotton through cottonseed products. Veit examined the categorization of cotton as alternatively waste and food. While cottonseed began as an agricultural byproduct, companies started producing cottonseed oil, which positioned cotton as a food. Crisco brand shortening, unlike its predecessors, did not advertise its inclusion of cottonseed oil, despite being named for this ingredient, making cotton “waste” again. (This editorial assistant was delighted to learn that Crisco is short for crystallized cottonseed oil.) Veit noted that because cotton is considered a food, cotton fields are not protected from pesticides like food crops are. Cottonseed oil, however, is still widely used in American foods, like some mayonnaises and Girl Scout cookies. Von Stackelberg and Hege used closed economies to frame their thinking about cotton, which produced a great deal of byproducts and would-be waste, especially the seeds, which—before the successful creation of cottonseed oil—needed to be properly stored and disposed of. Von Stackelberg and Hege focused on another use of cotton seeds: cotton could be processed to the point of becoming cellulose, which could then be used in many things, including gunpowder and film for movies and other visual media. This intensive, chemical-based purification process, von Stackelberg and Hege argued, embedded a plantation logic of efficiency while removing the role of Black labor in cotton production. Both papers dovetailed together nicely, leaving the panel attendees to think about the role of race, capital, and industrialization in America’s continued relationship with cotton.
Panelists at the plenary session, “Historians and the Attacks on Education.” From left to right: David Blight, Nancy MacLean, Joshua Cowen, Johann Neem, Leslie Harris, and David Pepper. Photo by Andrew Cooper.
At the Thursday Plenary, “Historians and the Attacks on Education,” OAH President David W. Blight invited panelists Nancy MacLean (Duke University), David Pepper (Kettering Foundation), Leslie Harris (Northwestern University), Johann Neem (Western Washington University), and Joshua Cowen (Michigan State University) to discuss the attacks on history, libraries, federal agencies, museums, the National Park Service, and education generally at the university, college, and K-12 levels.
During the opening remarks from each of the panelists, David Pepper expressed his concerns that responses to attacks on historians, teachers, and other academics are too piecemeal to be effective. He called for those who value democracy and education to come together to fight these challenges in a “unified defiance,” instead of “divided compliance,” imploring us to “fight back as entire universities” to maintain the credibility and independence of higher education in America.
Leslie Harris discussed the “dangers we all face” under the current regime, and pointed to higher education as a historical flashpoint in the struggle for equity and access. She framed the current attacks on higher education as “part of a nearly hundred year struggle to make the university more representative of the world we actually live in.” Like Pepper, Harris emphasized the need for unity in fighting these attacks on education, especially between educators and the administration of colleges and universities.
In Johann Neem’s opening remarks, he wondered why historians have become a scapegoat under the new administration. Neem posited that the right has come to re-identify many historians as non-Americans, which has pushed historians out of the conversation and fractured the ideal of a unified “cultural center.” He suggested that the left has changed, too, arguing that the push towards equality beginning in the 1960s radicalized the right. A lack of trust, he remarked, has perhaps ruined the view of public education in the eyes of the average American. He called on historians to fulfill our responsibility to tell honest histories, despite challenges from all over.
Joshua Cowen explained the tactics he normally utilizes when speaking to legislatures, which is to “call the thing the thing.” Focusing on the example of the privatization of public education, Cowen argued that public schools are an important linchpin in education and, thus, democracy, in America. States can, he emphasized, equitably fund public schools and public programs; they simply need the incentives and federal mandates to do so.
Nancy MacLean delivering her opening remarks at the plenary session. Photo by Andrew Cooper.
Finally, Nancy MacLean argued that predatory capitalists, white supremacists, and religious conservatives have for decades formed an “enduring reactionary partnership,” united to attack education and other public goods in American democracy to protect their financial status and social mores. Their end, she clarified, is eugenic: they seek to dominate and trample those whom they deem inferior. The combined forces of racism, nativism, gender anxiety, homophobia, and transphobia, she said, cannot win honestly, so they work to achieve their goals by eating away at progressive institutions like the media and universities. MacLean ended her opening remarks by calling upon historians to fight like the world depends on them, “because it does.”
Blight then posed two questions for the panelists: how have educators at all levels made themselves a target, and what are some concrete strategies we can use to fight back? While Neem agreed that historians have made themselves a target, Harris pushed back on this idea, wondering why those who profit most from higher education don’t work to protect it. She lamented the ease with which some institutions have conceded in the face of such attacks, and stressed the need to “get into those executive offices and build some backbone.” Pepper emphasized the importance of courthouses and statehouses as “frontlines” in upholding democracy. MacLean highlighted the work of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to protect minority students from these attacks, and entreated the crowd that “this is not a moment to back down.”
The plenary ended with questions from the various students, professors, and K–12 teachers in the crowd. In response to a question about responsible resistance in the light of these attacks on education and democracy, Harris emphasized the need to “not be alone,” and to find and cultivate communities of solidarity. MacLean called on tenured professors to step up to protect their students in these precarious situations. Another attendee urged educators to go beyond their own circles to find allies, especially among other working-class educators.
Attendees packed the ballroom to listen to the panelists at the plenary, which was standing-room-only even after adding extra rows of chairs. Photo by Andrew Cooper.
Another undergraduate called for administrators, trustees, and professors to meaningfully support their students who are protesting and speaking out against attacks on democracy, especially at the university level. MacLean acknowledged the importance of professors and other university professionals to provide “backup” for their students. Harris urged historians and educators at all levels to continue working toward upholding and defending democracy. She also called for the restoration of the ecosystem of higher education, saying “If any part of this ecosystem fails, we will all go down.”
After a day of panels, networking, and the opportunity to visit the book fair in the Exhibit Hall, attendees were invited to enjoy the opening night reception and catch up with friends, old and new. We’re looking forward to bringing you more highlights from the rest of the conference, so check back soon for updates.
