Professor Sweet, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is also the president of the American Historical Association (AHA). The AHA has more than 11,500 members. It publishes the American Historical Review, ‘the journal of record for the historical profession in the United States’.
“If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues – race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism – are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralising the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines.”