We kick of season 4 with a miniseries titled “State of the Field of Busy Teachers.” In four brief episodes we offer teachers—or really anyone crunched for time—a rapid review of a field of historical scholarship, including how the field has evolved, where it is now, and where one might go to learn more. This first installment features historian Jennifer Hart on the state of the field of African History.

This next installment in our series “State of the Field of Busy Teachers” features historian Ned Blackhawk on the state of the field of Native American History.

This next installment in our series “State of the Field of Busy Teachers” features historian Don Romesburg on the state of the field of LGBTQ+ History.

This final installment in our series “State of the Field of Busy Teachers” features historian Walter Greason on the state of the field of Graphic History.

In this final episode of season 3, we talk with Kate Carpenter, creator and host of the podcast Drafting the Past, which explores the craft of writing history, and researcher of the history of storm chasing in the U.S. We examine the many angles on history writing that Kate explores in her podcast, question what a closer look at this aspect of historians’ work illuminates about the discipline and about the work of history more broadly, and delve into the fascinating history of storm chasing on the Great Plains.

A Martian lands on Earth, heads to the nearest university’s History Department, and asks the question, “What is Asia?” What kind of response would they get? We explore this question with historian Nile Green, who outlines a forum titled “Big Asia: Rethinking a Region” that appears in the June 2025 issue of the AHR.

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, we investigate the challenges and opportunities of teaching the Vietnam War and the ways that understanding the war has changed. We speak with four contributors to an AHR forum entitled “The Vietnam War Fifty Years On,” published in the March 2025 issue—Thy Phu, David Biggs, Wen-Qing Ngoei, and Jana Lipman. And we pay a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Historian Lily Pearl Balloffet explores the real, live human relationships we form in the process of doing historical work and how, for her, those vital connections were decisively disrupted in the years of the global Covid-19 pandemic.