The American Experiment  |  In Partnership with Ohio Local History Alliance

The 2025 AASLH Annual Conference, in partnership with Ohio Local History Alliance, will take place as the history field makes the final preparations to kickoff off the 250th commemoration of the founding of the United States. The 2025 conference theme, inspired by AASLH’s Making History at 250: The Field Guide for Semiquincentennial, is an opportunity to broadly explore one of the guide’s themes, The American Experiment. For many in the American colonies in 1776, independence from Britain represented a “leap into the dark” into an unknown future. The leaders of the founding era did not have all the answers. Though their innovations of representative democracy and rights-based constitutionalism were transformative, they knew the nation was a revolutionary experiment. Like many experiments, the United States has had many fits, starts, shortcomings, and outright failures. Indigenous dispossession and chattel slavery, Jim Crow and segregation, systemic racism, and many others. Yet, with each failure, Americans have challenged the status quo; driving new forms of experimentation to bring the United States closer to its lofty goal of a “more perfect union.”

The 1776 revolutionary experiment benefited mostly white males with property. In the years since, unheard voices emerged for the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Women, Black Americans, Indigenous Peoples, people with disabilities, and immigrants have contributed their voices, lived experiences, and diverse perspectives to The American Experiment. As we approach America 250, we history practitioners can help the public at large explore the origins of our civic institutions, think critically about how they’ve changed, and how they will actively shape our nation for the next 250 years.

The role of history organizations as vibrant hubs of civic and community conversation is more important than ever. How might we partner with our communities to understand and address the pressing issues of today and the future? How can we empower our audiences to consider the effects of The American Experiment and engage in civic participation? What “leaps into the dark” are we taking now, and what can we learn from our own experiments and share with each other to advance our field?

The concept of experimentation does not presume success. We hope that conference attendees will further embrace the theme of experimentation to talk about our own leaps in the dark even if they were unsuccessful. While it is always great to hear about our successes, we also learn a great deal from our failures. Let us be brave and highlight our spectacular failures in ways that advance our learning and our knowledge in a way that advances the field.

It is fitting that the 2025 AASLH Annual Conference is in Cincinnati. The city was founded in 1788, but the Shawnee, Miami, and other indigenous people inhabited the land along what is now the Ohio River long before white men settled the area now known as southern Ohio. The city is named for the Society of the Cincinnati, which commemorated Roman general Cincinnatus as a hero of republican citizenship who gave back his military authority to retire peacefully. An outpost of the Northwest Territory after the forced removal of indigenous tribes, Cincinnati grew quickly from frontier town to “Paris of the West.” It boomed in the 19th century, fueled by westward expansion, bustling river traffic, and waves of new immigrants. By 1850, Cincinnati was the sixth largest city in the United States. The Ohio River, dividing free Ohio and slave-holding Kentucky, was a significant border for many freedom-seekers, even as it was also a conduit for the internal slave trade. Cincinnati became a destination for Black individuals escaping enslavement and a locus for the Underground Railroad and Abolitionist movement.

Later in the city’s history, railroads supplanted boats, and Cincinnati became a hub of reinvention. Today, Cincinnati’s colorful neighborhoods and thriving arts scene benefit from a resilient economy. In addition to the first professional baseball team and Skyline Chili, the city is home to Kroger, Procter & Gamble, Kenner Toys, Bicycle playing cards, and King Records. The city teems with museums, theaters, and public art—from the Taft Museum of Art and Cincinnati Museum Center in Union Terminal to the Harriet Beecher Stowe House and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. The city’s proud brewing history, once decimated by Prohibition, has come roaring back, and craft brews and farm-to-table cuisine fill beautiful historic buildings city-wide. The inscription of Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, eight nearby monumental mound sites, to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2023 is bringing international attention to this vibrant region.

One constant among all this change is that Cincinnati has always been a borderland at the nexus of east and west, north and south, free and enslaved, red and blue. This mix of influences has helped Cincinnati keep constantly experimenting and evolving and makes it a place where people of difference can encounter each other and work together to create change. Cincinnati is, in all ways, a city that defines, contributes to, and reflects The American Experiment.

We are excited for you to join us in Cincinnati as we encourage discussion about our democracy and civic institutions and how they can help strengthen understanding, inspire action, and reveal ways that all of us can participate in and shape the ongoing American experiment.