The American Historical Association (AHA) is a society of historians and teachers of history founded in 1884 and incorporated by the United States Congress in 1889. Today, the Association is active in encouraging the teaching of history in schools, preserving historical material, and publishing a variety of historical material.
The irony of this founding generation's historical efforts, in a discipline still then defined almost exclusively by methods of documentary criticism, and thus by sources recognized by their literate form, was that writings about Africa were largely those of Europeans.
Beneath the many technical issues and substantive debates along the course of this historical safari lay a constant struggle to convert these alien disciplines to their own historical purposes, that is, to qualify archaeology, linguistics, anthropology, and oral narratives as proxies for the dated documents of the established discipline.
The AmericanHistoricalAssociation is the context that keeps newer styles of history from taking older ones for granted, and here is where older ones are exposed to resonances of the new that animate what they have already accomplished.
To crown the series of events attending the creation of historical societies came the organization of the AmericanHistoricalAssociation in 1884.
Taken together these two expressions of historical effort have bound up the interests of scattered American scholars, intensified their purpose, clarified their understanding, and enabled them to lay better foundations for a national school of history than we could have expected to evolve under the old individualistic method of procedure.
They have had, also, an important influence on the writing of history, although it is probable that their best work is in the nature of a foundation for a greater structure to be erected in the future.
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