James R. Grossman is executive director of the American Historical Association, the largest professional association of historians in the world. A scholar of African-American history and the author of two award-winning books, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration and A Chance to Make Good: African-Americans, 1900–1929, he is a fierce advocate for the crucial role of historical thinking in public life. With his insistence that clear historical writing can shape public policy in important ways and his strong support for historians working in a broad range of venues, he exemplifies the SAH’s mission to bring good historical writing to the largest possible audience.
Prior to joining the AHA, Grossman was vice president for research and education at the Newberry Library and project director and co-editor of the print and digital Encyclopedia of Chicago. He also served as editor of the series Historical Studies of Urban America, for some 50 volumes. A master of the short essay, he is a frequent newspaper contributor and for the past fifteen years has used his column in the monthly AHA newsmagazine to argue powerfully for the proposition that History Matters.
Grossman has taken an unusually broad view of the work of a Learned Society, positioning the AHA as a group that champions the cause of history within the academy and well beyond. He has used his position at the AHA to support historians in K-12 classrooms, colleges and universities, museums and government agencies. He has pushed for a broad definition of historical scholarship that includes (but is not limited to) textbooks, official histories, reference books, op-eds, blog posts, magazine articles, museum exhibitions, public lectures, congressional testimony, oral history projects, expert witness testimony, media appearances, podcasts, and historical games.
For his writing and advocacy for the historical profession, the Society of American Historians is pleased to honor James Grossman with the Tony Horwitz Prize.